


Quantum Entanglement

by Erisette



Category: ONF (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Not K-Pop Idols, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Complete (MV), Gen, ON/OFF (MV), Team as Family, Teenage Rebellion, We Must Love (MV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2019-12-18 14:12:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 43,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18251477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erisette/pseuds/Erisette
Summary: Five wards of the state--and one android chaperone--on a simple mission to Old Earth. Turn off some beacons, come back home to the moon: hardly worth the worry. But then they are five boys and two androids and suddenly the mission is so much more complicated.(Or: an AU based on ONF's first 3 MVs)“Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.”("All of our MVs have been about meeting and separation" -Wyatt)





	1. (liftoff)

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently I have no self-control, so here it is! I don't know how long it will be except "longer than I have any business writing'. This is essentially a novelization of ONF's three first MVs, or at least my interpretation thereof. 
> 
> Note: this is a gen fic and it will stay that way! The space-boys are more like brothers than anything else~
> 
> Enjoy the fic! :D

 

The Old Astronomer, by Sarah Williams

_Reach me down my Tycho Brahé,—I would know him when we meet,_

_When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;_

_He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how_

_We are working to completion, working on from then till now._

 

_Pray, remember, that I leave you all my theory complete,_

_Lacking only certain data, for your adding, as is meet;_

_And remember, men will scorn it, ’tis original and true,_

_And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you._

 

_But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learnt the worth of scorn;_

_You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn;_

_What, for us, are all distractions of men's fellowship and smiles?_

_What, for us, the goddess Pleasure, with her meretricious wiles?_

 

_You may tell that German College that their honour comes too late._

_But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate;_

_Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;_

_I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night._

 

_What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight;_

_You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night._

_I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known._

_You “have none but me,” you murmur, and I “leave you quite alone”?_

 

_Well then, kiss me,—since my mother left her blessing on my brow,_

_There has been a something wanting in my nature until now;_

_I can dimly comprehend it,—that I might have been more kind,_

_Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind._

 

_I “have never failed in kindness”? No, we lived too high for strife,—_

_Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life;_

_But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still_

_To the service of our science: you will further it? you will!_

 

_There are certain calculations I should like to make with you,_

_To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true;_

_And remember, “Patience, Patience,” is the watchword of a sage,_

_Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age._

 

_I have sown, like Tycho Brahé, that a greater man may reap;_

_But if none should do my reaping, ’twill disturb me in my sleep._

_So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name;_

_See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame._

 

_I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak;_

_Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak:_

_It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars,—_

_God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars._

 

* * *

 [](https://www.flickr.com/photos/154914812@N05/46560581595/in/dateposted-public/)

  


“What if they send us into a mine. I have too much life ahead of me to die in a tunnel somewhere.”

 

“You’re not going to die in a tunnel somewhere,” Seungjun said absently. He was tapping away at the display on his desk, and didn’t even look up. “Stop being such a worrywart.”

 

Changyoon scoffed. “I’m not worrying. Who’s worrying?”

 

“Whatever it is, we’ll be fine,” Jaeyoung said in his most soothing deep voice, shifting slightly where he was sat on Seungjun’s desk to provide some cover. “We can do anything they throw at us.”

 

“Of course! Now if I can just…” Seungjun cut himself off, then crowed in triumph. “Hah! There it is! The representative _is_ giving us an android babysitter, I knew it.”

 

Jaeyoung craned his neck down, not very sneakily, and looked at the display. “Huh. A Hyojin, looks like.”

 

“Not just _a_ Hyojin.” Seungjun’s voice was high and bright and he beamed at them and shook his fists excitedly. “It’s _our_ Hyojin!”

 

“Just because you’re seen that particular one off and on during the last ten or so years doesn’t really make it ‘ours’,” Minkyun said, even as he shifted his own position some to give Seungjun’s actions better coverage from the right-corner security camera. “You were the first one assigned to this block so none of the rest of us has seen him that often. And besides, androids working in social services get more memory deletions than any of them.”

 

“You’re not going to stop naming the vacuum robots even though they can’t really think,” Yuto pointed out quietly, suppressing a smile when Minkyun made a sour face in response. “It might matter. I think I didn’t like the other Hyojin I’ve met as much as Seungjun’s.” He had liked Minkyun’s robots more than any other vacuum robots, too: probably because the way Minkyun talked to them like they could understand him, and got out of bed at four in the morning when he got an alert that one was stuck in a hole, and turned them over to gently clean the little movement-tracks when they got fouled with gunk. Yuto had never treated electronics badly, but he found himself acting with a little more unconscious courtesy even to his alarm clock ever since the first time Minkyun took him to meet the small army of cleaners.

 

“I helped reprogram those two ancient cleaner ‘bots for you when they were scheduled for recycling,” Seungjun said innocently. “Zippy and Zappy, was it?”

 

“Zippy and Ziggy, actually,” Minkyun said, even as he grinned at him. “But fine. Point taken. The babysitter will be welcomed with open arms.”

 

“A more accurate term would be ‘chaperone’ or ‘escort’.” All five boys scrambled to sit properly in their assigned seats as he spoke, and their block’s chief supervisor looked them over indulgently. “But I’m sure you all know that.”

 

“Yes, Representative,” they chorused

 

“I’m glad you’re coming with us, Hyojin!” Seungjun added.

 

“It’s good to see you,” the Hyojin replied. He didn’t smile--androids usually didn’t: apparently at some point it had been decided that given the lack of emotion behind them, the smiles usually were a little too ‘uncanny valley’--but he managed to look pleasant. Yuto thought he might be able to pick this Hyojin out as Seungjun’s friend if he needed to from a lineup of different units of the same model, though he couldn’t articulate why. His hair was a lighter red than most of them, maybe? Or something about the set of the shoulders? Of course the barcode on his neck would be unique as well, but Yuto couldn’t really read those without a scanner of some kind.

 

“As you know, you’re being assigned a field task. As you _also_ know--” the representative looked pointedly at Changyoon, who was stiff and still except for a nervous tapping of his fingers: “--you would never be assigned a task that was assessed to be too dangerous. You are still wards of the state, and the state takes that responsibility seriously.”

 

“It does,” Jaeyoung said evenly. It was neither an agreement or a question. Their representative sighed.

 

“Well, my colleagues in this block do, certainly. I hope you don’t think that I would send you into some kind of certain doom.”

 

“We know that,” Seungjun hastened to say, and smiled winningly at him. The other boys followed suit. “So! What adventure awaits us?”

 

“Of course you didn’t hack into the mainframe to find out your assignment ahead of time,” the representative said, even as he logged in to the teacher-station and pulled up something on the big screen.

 

“Of course not!” Seungjun said in an injured voice. Yuto suspected he hadn’t, but only for lack of time.

 

“Mm-hmm.” He swiped a map up onto the screen, and they leaned forward in unified interest. “What you’re seeing is a composite of current satellite imagery with old and incomplete maps. At the center--” he traced a pattern in the station and the relevant section enlarged: “--is a former outpost, likely built and then abandoned quite shortly before the exodus.”

 

“So it’s not even properly antique, it’s just old,” Minkyun said, and grinned unrepentantly at the sideways eye the representative gave him.

 

“...you might say that. I personally would think anything over 300 years old qualifies as an antique, but that close to the end the technology of the atmospheric seals might have been good enough that it still looks pretty fresh in there.”

 

“I assume we’re not just visiting Old Dirt for historical reasons,” Seungjun said, and the representative answered by throwing another picture on the screen, this time a waveform diagram.

 

“You will be visiting Old _Earth_ for a reason, yes.” He jerked his thumb at the screen. “What you’re seeing now is a signal. Or more accurately a distress call.”

 

The boys straightened at that, and some of them exchanged glances. “Someone’s in trouble?” Jaeyoung asked. “One of the Revisionists?”

 

“Highly unlikely. The few people who chose to return to the planet once it stabilized tend to live in much more temperate areas. This base is essentially in the middle of the desert, and doesn’t have much to recommend it except solar energy.”

 

“Which might help keep the outpost’s technology running, more or less,” Hyojin pointed out.

 

“That’s the guess. We suspect that there have finally been enough faults and shorts in the system that fail-safes are going off, and a fairly powerful beacon has been used for the distress call, as a result. Moreover, that beacon seems to have set off several dormant communication components in the surrounding area, and we’ve got much fainter alarms going off for many square kilometers.”

 

“And why is this our problem?” Seungjun asked, then waved his hands to cut off a possible response, adding, “I know, I know, _we’ve_ got a ‘debt to society’. I mean more why our base. Us. Korea base, WM-block.”

 

The representative smiled wryly. “As it happens, despite its geographic location this particular outpost was run by our ancestors. The frequency used is mostly used by us, and most other bases won’t pick up the signal enough to be annoyed by it.”

 

There was a moment of silence as they digested the information, before Changyoon cleared his throat awkwardly. “So. We have to just go down and turn off the beacon? That sounds genuinely undeadly, thank you, Representative!”

 

“It’s not quite as simple as that, Changyoon, since you’ll have to triangulate all the little echo signals as well: but you’re welcome, anyway.” He leaned back against the podium. “You’re being issued an android, clearly. Interestingly, this Hyojin has a flag in the system getting him preferentially assigned here.” Seungjun looked up at the ceiling innocently, and the representative snorted. “Hmm. Anyway, along with Hyojin you’ll have three portable transporters, a couple of ration generators, a general supply pack each, and enough UV-block to cover a small shuttle. Any questions?”

 

Yuto raised his hand. “How far do the port-squares go?”

 

“These are standard wrist-teleport units: they can send two people about a kilometer away.”

 

“I can triangulate the signals quite easily with three teams spread out,” Hyojin added.

 

The representative waited for further questions, but got none. Changyoon was tapping his fingers on the desk, Minkyun was wriggling slightly, and Yuto had reached his hand back to where Jaeyoung could take it and squeeze it reassuringly. The representative smiled at him, a genuinely kind smile, and Yuto was thankful again that even though he wasn’t in the best of situations, it wasn’t just the other members who were good to him but the immediate staff as well. “I wasn’t blowing smoke when I said I wouldn’t set you a task I thought would hurt you, kids. I suspect you’ll spend a couple of weeks wandering around poking ancient equipment and return with some fun memories and maybe a sunburn. You leave in an hour: supplies in each of your rooms, go on and change and report to the main station-to-station transporter.”

 

Minkyun raised his hand. “Can we take a personal item?”

 

“Nothing alive and nothing illegal. But yes: if it fits in your pack and fits those parameters, you’re welcome to.”

 

“You’re the one who’d be carrying it around,” Seungjun muttered cheekily to him, and got a tongue stuck out at him in response. He returned the childish gesture, and stood up with a clap. “So! Let’s get going.”

 

***

* * *

***

 

Jaeyoung was waiting when the others started trickling in one by one. He had moved a bench around so he could sit on one and put his feet up on the other, and he gave them a casual look when they arrived. “Hey. What do you think about all of this?”

 

“It could be, uh, interesting? I guess?” Changyoon shrugged a little crookedly, shifting to make room for Yuto to set down his bag as well. “It’s something to do, anyway. It was getting boring around here.”

 

“ _This_ is interesting!” Minkyun’s strident voice cut in as he joined them. “I’ve been through the smaller block-to-block teleporters before, of course, and did the training with the port-squares, but never something powerful enough to send you to another _planet_.”

 

“I have,” Yuto offered diffidently. “It feels pretty the same. Even if it’s sending you that far.”

 

“Technically it sends you through a series of relays rather than directly to the planet,” Seungjun said, coming through the entrance with Hyojin at his heels. “So it’s not really sending you ‘that far’.”

 

“Technically,” Jaeyoung echoed seriously. Seungjun squinted at him, knowing he was being teased, and made a rude gesture.

 

“Enough of that.” The representative’s voice preceded him, and they all scrambled to a kind of attention as he entered. He visibly worked to not notice the moved furniture as he clasped his hands behind his back and looked them over. “Well. You should be all set up--who has the teleporters?” Seungjun, Jaeyoung, and Changyoon raised their hands. “Good.” The bigger supplies were on a baggage handler, a low platform a few feet square with multiple small robotic spider-legs underneath that could carry it over most terrain, and as he gestured it scuttled over to Hyojin who rested an unnecessary hand on top of the load.

 

“We’ll do a good job, Representative,” Seungjun reassured him, glancing around the others for their agreement before nodding firmly. “We can do this. We’ll be back in no time.”

 

“I’m sure you will,” the representative said, and patted him gently on the shoulder. “Well.”

 

There was a moment of awkward silence.

 

“Shall we go?” Jaeyoung said, already placing one chivvying hand at Minkyun’s back and holding Yuto’s hand with the other.

 

“Yes, let’s,” Seungjun said, and took his place at the head of the column--Changyoon behind him, then Minkyun, Yuto, Jaeyoung, and the android with the baggage. He led the way through the big archway of the teleporter

 

And

 

Then

 

They

 

Were

 

Gone

  


***

* * *

***

 

_Notes:_

 

_Robot vacuums: animal life is pretty tightly controlled and regulated on the moon bases, so Minkyun gets something else to dote on besides cats._

_The institution: The boys are wards of the state, delinquents and not: their situation is not ideal for many reasons, but I didn't want to vilify the staff around them--since this is effectively standing in for WM Entertainment and the impressions I've received from all the behind-the-scenes stuff we've seen are that the staff genuinely care about the kids in their care. I wanted to carry that over somewhat._

_Port-squares: **Port** able tele **por** ter, aka port²=port-square. _

 


	2. (down to earth)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> None of the other chapters will be posted this quickly X| but this one was ready so here it is! Please let me know if you like it <3

 

They blinked back into existence on a low round platform lit with pink warning lights. Most of them stumbled--even the baggage handler staggered as its gyros worked to reacquire a fix in the new environment--but Hyojin was as steady as ever. “Everyone alright?” He asked clearly.

 

Minkyun made a disgusted noise. “I feel like my _vestibules_ are trying to crawl out of my _ears_.”

 

Hyojin blinked and looked at Seungjun, who patted him on the shoulder and then left his hand there as he also tried to get his bearings. “Just a dumb joke, Hyojin, about being dizzy. He’s probably trying to distract himself so he won’t hurl.”

 

“ _I’m not gonna hurl,_ ” Minkyun fired back peevishly, straightening to his full height and swaying a little.

 

Yuto had leaned on Jaeyoung when they first blinked into being, and now he stepped away and craned his neck to look around. Jaeyoung did the same, and saw that the low platform was in a spherical room, the only lights the pink emergency blinkers. “Should we go in?” He asked, and everyone looked together towards the big circular port on the nearest wall, labeled with a large clear number 7.

 

“I would think so,” Seungjun said. “Hyojin? Would you be able to tell if it was safe to go inside?”

 

“I can in a minute.” The android stepped down lightly from the platform and went to the portal: there was a control pad beside it, and he touched it lightly with his fingertip. Everyone either went to watch him or sat on the edge of the low platform: there wasn’t much to watch, though. He just stared, unblinking, at nothing. The control panel flickered.

 

It was quite a long pause, actually, in which Changyoon and Minkyun tried to get the ration generator in the baggage handler’s load to produce snacks. Finally, Hyojin blinked, rapidly, and withdrew his finger. “Well?” Seungjun asked eagerly. He was the only one who had watched Hyojin the whole time. “What’s the verdict?”

 

“It’s not deadly,” he started. “Apologies for the pause: it was a little hard to communicate with the system. It’s an antique. The recyclers are pretty worn down, but I got it to cycle in some air from outside--it didn’t have a contingency in its programming for the outside air becoming breathable again.”

 

“Breathable is still kind of a matter of debate,” Changyoon said. “They only terraformed Old Dirt as a test before doing Mars, and it... _kind of_ worked. They say the atmo composition is kind of suspect.”

 

“There’s tri-ox injections in the med pack. You can pre-dose with them if you’re worried.” Hyojin turned his eyes to the baggage handler, which started to moving at the wireless signal he sent it. “You can enter the base, anyway. The mainframe was very helpful.”

 

“An AI?” Yuto went up to look at the control panel to see if he recognized anything.

 

“Not a proper AI, no. They had them back then but not for outposts like this. It accepted my input as valid and let me pull up the schematics of the place once I’d told it our mission parameters. The beacon is 1354 meters in--” he pointed: “--that direction, in the main communal space. It’s going off because of tripped failsafes, and we won’t be able to shut it down without a compatible power card.” He switched on his wrist display, and a wire schematic appeared over it: a flat square device about palm-sized. “There isn’t an abandoned store room where there would be several just lying around, so unfortunately we’re going to have to look the old-fashioned way.” Everyone else’s wrist displays chirped, and Jaeyoung looked to see a long, long list scrolling down. “Possible locations a compatible power card could be--mostly serving as a backup on equipment too big to take, or as a primary source on something not worth taking.”

 

“Should we split into teams, then?” Seungjun asked. “Three twos or two threes?”

 

“By twos would be fine, I’d think,” Jaeyoung said. “Everyone find your exit buddy.”

 

Changyoon held out his hand palm-down around chin-height, his most blank I’m-telling-a-joke face on. “Anyone below this height has to hold someone’s hand.” Yuto, the shortest of the party by a noticeable margin, gave him an unimpressed look and stood up on his tippy-toes. “That’s fair,” Changyoon admitted. Minkyun, who would be taller even than Jaeyoung if he ever got good posture, sidled next to him and crouched down to where he could tuck his head under the hovering palm.

 

“Kkyunie needs his hand held!” He said, and snickered.

 

“Of course. Anyone can see you’re below the limit.” Changyoon ceremoniously clasped his hand.

 

“Hyung, let’s leave them in here to do their gag routine in peace,” Yuto said to Jaeyoung in a stage-whisper, then grinned his face-splitting grin as the comedy duo protested.

 

“Hyung?” Hyojin said once they’d stopped whining. “Wards of the state are grouped with people no more than a year differing in age, though….”

 

Everyone froze and exchanged guilty looks. Jaeyoung found himself shifting slightly to put himself between Yuto and the android--as though that would do anything, no one made an android without object permanence….

 

Seungjun cleared his throat. “Ah. Well. There was a communication...when he first...anyway, he’s ours now, you wouldn’t say anything would you, Hyojin? They might reassign him! We’ve only got a year and then we’ll be graduated from the program to become upstanding members of society.”

 

“I am required to report….” Hyojin fell silent, and Jaeyoung held his breath as calculations were evidently made. “Well-being should be the most important.”

 

“So you won’t tell?” Minkyun asked earnestly. He had also moved close enough to interrupt Hyojin’s line of sight to Yuto. “We’ll take care of him, you know!” Yuto shifted and Jaeyoung guessed he wanted to say he could take care of himself but didn’t think it’d be wise.

 

“I can file this information under ‘confidential temporary patient mental health data’,” Hyojin said. “Then it will all be deleted as soon as we get back and they reboot and recharge me.”

 

“So you won’t remember at all?”

 

Hyojin nodded.

 

“That feels weird,” Changyoon muttered.

 

“But thank you, Hyojin.” Seungjun touched his arm lightly. “We appreciate it.”

 

“You are welcome,” Hyojin said courteously.

 

The doors slid open grudgingly, with a faint nasty squeal as components unused for centuries ground against each other. Interestingly, they opened up-down rather than side-to-side. It took several full minutes for them to open entirely, in which more impatient people (Minkyun, dragging Changyoon behind him) went ahead and climbed over the lower half of the door. “It stinks in here!” he called back to them. “Like burnt rubber and old algae!”

 

“The outer circulation will start to help in the next half-hour,” Hyojin said, guiding the baggage handler over the gap in the floor. When they had all gone through to the main base, the door closed behind them--a little quicker but with a much worse noise.

 

“Should we turn this off?” Seungjun asked, standing back and looking the round portal over. “If fail-safes are going off I’d think we’d want to drain as little power as possible.”

 

“That would be good,” Hyojin agreed, and Jaeyoung went to the control panel to hit the off switch. The pink lights faded and the seriously old-school security camera by the door drooped into inactivity.

 

“We can get back though, right?” Changyoon asked. He was still holding Minkyun’s hand, neither willing to be the first one to give up the bit. “If it doesn’t boot back up.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” Seungjun assured him, tapping the bulky device on his wrist. “It can help the moon teleporter if there’s something on this end to lock on to, but the port-squares will work as well as that old thing.”

 

“Should we get going?” Changyoon said, conspicuously not going first.

 

“Sure!” Seungjun said cheerfully. “Hyojin, in your download did you get schematics of the base?” Hyojin nodded, and everyone’s wrist display lit up with the schematics in question. “Perfect. I think I’ve got you as my buddy, Hyojin. Looks like...hmm. According to the map the maintenance section was over in the north-west area, let’s start there. Don’t go to any lower floors for now, kids, this is plenty to start with and the beacon is here. The other two teams can decide on where else to go so we don’t overlap too much, and everyone stay in touch over comms. Remember, just because it doesn’t seem dangerous doesn’t mean it isn’t.”

 

“We’ll be fine, mom,” Minkyun said with a laugh, and dragged Changyoon and his long-suffering expression towards the baggage handler. “We’ll keep this with us!”

 

“You can lead it to the center of the main chamber and leave it there,” Seungjun said, rolling his eyes even as he and the android started off. “It’s not your personal snack cart.”

 

“That’s a matter of _opinion_ ,” Minkyun shouted at his back.

 

“Where should we go, hyung?” Yuto, their dutiful and hardworking angel, asked Jaeyoung.

 

Jaeyoung patted his shoulder and looked at the map. “The other corridor here leads to the main living areas, looks like. We can go together and split off at the main chamber here.”

 

“And that's where the baggage handler will stay just like Seungjun said, right?” asked Yuto with a lilt of laughter to his voice.

 

“Mama’s boy,” Minkyun said without any real heat, and they started off.

 

***

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/154914812@N05/47518945821/in/dateposted-public/)

***

Most of what they passed on the way to the main chambers were small living pods, dark and closed-off. One was faintly lit and glowed brighter as they stood in front of it. Changyoon sucked in a startled squeak as he pointed with his unoccupied hand. “Is it….”

 

“A body??” Minkyun plastered himself against the glass, trying to see the form on the bed. “Doesn’t look rotted or anything. I guess if it was hermetically sealed….”

 

Jaeyoung moved to the far end of the window where he had the best angle for looking in the bed and made a sound as he got it. “Ahh, no, it’s an android--look, it looks like a Minseok model.”

 

“Minseoks were in production that far back?”

 

“I guess so. They did tell us this place was in operation right at the end--they could have _just_ started using that model. Looks pretty much identical to the ones they make now.”

 

“Why is he on a bed and not a charge station?” Changyoon squinted. “It looks like a human’s room. And why wouldn’t they take him with them when they left? Even a non-functioning android could be worth a lot in parts, especially back then.”

 

“Maybe he was completely fried somehow. Depending on how fast they cleared out it might have been considered not worth the effort of carrying him with them.” Jaeyoung straightened and shrugged. “Who knows. Not worth trying to get through privacy locks to get to him when there’s the whole base to look through for what we actually came for.” That was inarguably true, and they moved on to continue to the main chamber.

 

When they did spill out into the main hub they all stopped to look around. It was designed to look like some kind of small city street, although the high ceiling was obviously translucent roof rather than clear sky. The faint light of that roof was supplemented by various flickering fixtures in storefronts and archways. There was scattered detritus of various weird retro things, as well as straight trash: most interestingly, there were plants here and there--vines that had forced their way out of paver cracks and started to enclose lamp posts, bits of scrubby things in corners and ledges, one small light-starved tree by a fallen sign. All over the ground there were tiny scraps of pink and yellow and blue.

 

“What’s with this?” Yuto asked, stirring a drift of the papers with his foot. They scattered in the small wind, incredibly thin and light.

 

“Not sure,” Jaeyoung admitted. “I feel like I should know, but I never paid enough attention in history class. Nowhere I know of would just throw paper around like this, even in the streets of Langrenus.” Jaeyoung was the only one of them who’d lived in the moon’s largest city, and the others tended to treat him like an authority on anything bigger than a block, which was fine, but his time in the city had been focused on survival more than sight-seeing.

 

“Confetti!” Minkyun burst out. “That’s what it’s called! You see it in old movies all the time. They threw it around to celebrate.”

 

“What were they celebrating?” Changyoon asked from where he was directing the baggage handler to a clear spot in the middle. “The end of the world?”

 

“Leaving it, more likely. If this was at the tail end of the exodus they might have just gotten their turn to evacuate to the lunar bases.”

 

“Where is this beacon, anyway?” Changyoon shook his wrist display and flicked the side of it, which didn’t help, and Yuto rolled his eyes at him.

 

“The schematic said over there, hyung.”

 

“How do you sound _more_ sassy when you call us a respectful term,” Minkyun complained even as he followed their youngest. He had finally let go of Changyoon’s hand.

 

“Yuto is a good and respectful boy,” Jaeyoung protested.

 

“Of course he is,” Changyoon agreed, slinging his arm over Yuto’s shoulders. “But he’s always got something brewing. You can see it in his eyes.”

 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Yuto said happily, not pulling away from his arm, and pointed at an unassuming corner of the big town-chamber. “Isn’t that it?”

 

They all straggled up to the beacon. It was shaped like a huge down-turned funnel, with blue lights running up several points of its sides and a large retro control panel on one side. The filtered light from the translucent ceiling wasn’t very bright here, but there was a couple of unusually bright artificial lights and a small stubborn tree that had grown up under them. There were prominent warning signs, and Jaeyoung grabbed and held Minkyun when he would have poked at the control panel.

 

“Well, there it is,” Changyoon said. He approached the tree, warily circling around the beacon, and gently touched its bark. “It can’t be too dangerous: this guy seems okay.” He handled a leaf, feather-light, then pulled away. “Still. I wish there was a way to substitute a spare power unit of some kind from our luggage: this is going to be a huge pain.”

 

“I bet our batteries would just scramble it. It’s a different level.”

 

Jaeyoung scratched at the back of his neck as he turned slowly in place, slightly overwhelmed and not even slightly sure where to start. “I guess we should split up. This could take a while.”

  



	3. electric sheep

 

When the android was brought back online he knew one thing: the mission was to shut down the beacon. He slowly, slowly sat upright on the springy-soft surface beneath him and blinked sluggishly at the wall as his systems struggled to boot up completely. There were error messages enough that he couldn’t hardly distinguish them, and some things were running on final  _ final  _ backup. He swung his legs slowly around til they dangled over the side of the bed, and tested his motor functions: his hands were slow-moving, the smallest finger on his left hand didn’t want to bend at all, and his neck groaned faintly as he turned it. When he slid off the bed and stood on his feet, he found that his right hip joint no longer had its full range of movement. The android knew two things: the mission, and that he had been inactive for three hundred and thirty-seven years.

 

He moved carefully across the room, slightly impeded by the hip joint and gradually loosening up the other joints and tendons. He came up to a mirror and looked at himself in it. There was debris in his eyes that he blinked away, and marks on the mirror that he reached out slowly to touch. “My name is….” he murmured in a faint and rusty voice, and he knew a third thing. “My name is Laun.” He smiled at himself in the mirror, just a little, those mechanisms stiff as well, and limped towards the door. 

 

The mission had been downloaded to him from the mainframe, and he queried it wirelessly for more information. He learned that the mission had been brought by six people, that they had come from the moon, and that one of them was an android. Their dossiers were included in the mission file, and he stored them instinctively even as he realized another thing: everyone he had ever known was dead.

 

“They left me alone,” he said aloud, though quietly, and it rang in the utter silence of the corridor. “Oh.” Androids were built to last, and thus hardwired with both the knowledge that they would outlive the humans around them and the ability to deal with that knowledge: but Laun found that he could not integrate and disperse his feelings as he was supposed to. “I miss them,” he said more softly still, and tucked his partially-working hands under his armpits. 

 

It didn’t take him long to reach the central town square, though it took longer than it used to. The walkways were not so clear as they had been. “That’s not safe,” he said, as he edged cautiously around a stalled and rusted vehicle. “Not….”

 

The six people who had brought the mission were well spread out in the base, he learned from the mainframe. It had taken it some time to awaken Laun, and they had covered a lot of ground in that time. He came up to the beacon alone, and looked up at it. “You’re still trying to do your job. But there’s no one to do it for. Or with.” He patted it, gently, feeling a painful pinch of empathy. The slot that needed the backup battery inserted was clear in front of him, faintly limned in blue light, and he hesitated. The base was very different from what he remembered. He wasn’t sure he could find a battery that was compatible, even if it would be intact and usable. 

 

He touched the left side of his chest, and sighed.

 

With one thought, an access port opened and he retrieved his primary backup power cell from its position in his chest. Warnings instantly began blaring from every system he possessed as they were suddenly forced to rely on a rapidly draining reservoir of systemic power. “It’s okay,” he told them absently, and slid the power cell into the beacon. When it clicked home the beacon, which had been in emergency power mode and locked, suddenly came online in the network. The mainframe triggered it to shut down without even needing Laun’s input.

 

“That’s good,” he murmured. He tried to step away from the beacon, and found that not just his right leg wasn’t obeying him. “It’s fine.” There was a clear patch of floor not far away, and he stumbled to it. There would plenty of space there, and his form wouldn’t endanger any unsuspecting feet. “Thank you,” he said, to no one: and then he knew nothing at all.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Hyojin-422N95O had first met Lee Sungjun (chart ID 49-AB-311-F) ten years, 4 months, and 26 days ago when he was first assigned to WM-block. They had interacted fairly frequently for a period of three months and two days, until Hyojin-422N95O was reassigned to a different block. At that time he’d received a cold reboot and a non-essential/protected information memory wipe, in accordance with standard policy for all androids in his field. 

 

He had been returned to WM-block for a brief stint a year later. Lee Seungjun had greeted him with evident excitement, and of course it was a matter of record that Hyojin-422N95O had interacted with him previously, so the android had responded appropriately: however Lee Seungjun was able to discern that he had no actual memory of their previous meeting. The young delinquent had subsequently treated Hyojin-422N95O with outright hostility. Hyojin-422N95O had smoothed things out with him as best as possible given the circumstances, since unnecessary mental stressors were contraindicated for healthy growth and rehabilitation. After about a month Lee Seungjun had softened towards him, at which point unfortunately the android was sent back to his primary posting, and properly wiped. 

 

It was fully two years later that Hyojin-422N95O was again on task at WM-block. Lee Seungjun had met him without hostility that time, though he didn’t seem exactly pleased. After a month in which they were in company quite often, Hyojin-422N95O had found himself alone in a room with Lee Seungjun performing non-essential tasks. In the middle of a task, Hyojin-422N95O had frozen in place as his connection with the mainframe was unexpectedly interrupted.

 

“Sorry, Hyojin,” Lee Seungjun had said: it was clear, when the android turned to look at him, that the device in his hands was illicitly constructed. “I wanted to be able to check with you first, instead of just doing something to you out of the blue. Would it….” He had trailed off and bitten his lip, with what the android calculated wasn’t enough force to injure himself. “I want to give you a small little update. An upgrade, really! Just a little partition where you can store memories, so you won’t have to forget things related to me when they assign you away.”

 

“‘Forgetting things’ is a matter of standard policy,” Hyojin-422N95O had reminded him. “Anything that it is vital for me to know for your well-being will be stored in the mainframe and I will have free access. Anything more would violate social privacy standards.”

 

“But, Hyojin….” He had sighed, and rubbed at his eyes. (He looked tired, and would need to drink more water to not be dehydrated.) “My well-being...I don’t have any friends. Did you know that?”

 

The android had nodded. “It’s in your file.”

 

“Great,” he had grumbled quietly. “Well, I feel like you’re kind of like my friend. We get along really well--even though we’re different I feel like we kind of click, you know? I really like talking to you, or working with you.”

 

He had paused. “Thank you,” Hyojin-422N95O had said.

 

“So if you wouldn’t forget me...that would be good for my mental well-being. Don’t you think?”

 

Hyojin-422N95O had thought about it. There were many variables to consider, and as he tried to process every factor he found that there were logic snarls that inhibited him from accurately evaluating all the possible permutations. Instead he tried to weigh two factors only: the negative weight of implicitly disobeying orders/policy vs the positive impact on Lee Seungjun’s emotional (and consequently physical) well-being. The variables seemed much less complex when he thought of it that way, and his programming relating to safeguarding the well-being of minors in government custody was much more fundamental than the programming relating to policy and procedure. For that reason, he had nodded at Lee Seungjun and said, “You can make your partition.”

 

Lee Seungjun’s face had taken on an expression of great happiness, and he had sprung out of his chair to do just that.

 

Over the years since, the benefit to Lee Seungjun has been great enough to justify the transgression, even as more youths were assigned to his block and he developed real, healthy human connections. The only downside was in certain side effects that Hyojin-422N95O had begun to accumulate during the time with the illicit programming. It caused some inexplicable faults in his programming--lines of junk code, illogical retention of unnecessary information. Not only did the android retain information about Lee Seungjun, he had analyzed his own actions and motivations and determined that he was making decisions regarding the inhabitants of WM-block that could not be explained purely by logic. He was retaining information about the others as well, in Lee Seungjun’s partition. He not infrequently spent inactive time checking on them remotely to determine their state of well-being, despite the fact that they had designated staff nearby that were already doing that. He most frequently observed their music therapy: first he had merely noted the songs that Lee Seungjun responded to most positively, but he had over time developed a definite preference of his own. Now he stored a not-small selection of music in his partition, for no reason that he would have been able to explain to a programmer.

 

Hyojin-422N95O, in short, was faulty.

 

***

 

As they searched the maintenance sector for the elusive power cell, Lee Seungjun kept up a steady stream of chatter. Hyojin-422N95O responded as well as he could: fortunately, even with only minimal responses Lee Seungjun was happy to keep conversing. Occasionally Hyojin-422N95O found it difficult to function optimally when Lee Seungjun had been speaking for long interrupted periods of time, since much of the speech was often borderline nonsensical and his processor was unable to track the information as accurately as it was supposed to. Lee Seungjun would generally diagnose this state as ‘annoyance’, which wasn’t entirely accurate, but he seemed pleased to think he’d ‘gotten under [the android’s] skin’ and so Hyojin-422N95O didn’t correct him.

 

At this precise moment though Hyojin-422N95O was having no issues with the talk. It helped fill the otherwise empty echo of the long-bereft hallways and their corpses of gutted machinery. 

 

“I can’t believe there’s not a salvageable battery in  _ any  _ of these,” Lee Seungjun was saying. His voice echoed weirdly from where he was buried head-first in a scrapped industrial-size baggage handler, and Hyojin-422N95O made a noise of disagreement while holding his hands over a sharp edge of metal to ensure the human wouldn’t tear his skin upon reemerging.

 

“The beacon was ‘cutting-edge’ technology back when this base was in operation, and its power cells were the same. That kind of technology would have been prioritized for taking with them to their new homes on the moon.” As Lee Seungjun worked himself back out of the machine, he unintentionally pushed the android’s palms into the metal hard enough that his synthetic skin was broken in a couple of places. A contingent of Hyojin-422N95O’s microbots roused themselves from stasis and quickly went to their nearly-microscopic work to stitch the small tears back together, and Hyojin-422N95O was careful not to move his hands too rapidly while the tiny drones were doing their repairs. 

 

Lee Seungjun sighed heavily. “I guess. It definitely makes our jobs harder. Is there any way you can think of to adapt one of our spare cells so it won’t blow it out in some disastrous way?”

 

“The issue would be--” Hyojin-422N95O’s speech cut off as the mainframe pinged him with a very unexpected piece of information. “The beacon has been shut off.”

 

“What?” Lee Seungjun’s voice was high in surprise: his eyes widened, then narrowed in a look of suspicion. He hit his wrist com and barely waited for the blip of a successful connection before scolding fiercely, “Yah! Idiots! Who found a battery and just stuck it in without me and Hyojin being there?” There was a brief pause, then a babble of injured or defensive protests from all the others. Lee Seungjun glared down at his wrist unit and shook his finger at it. “One at a time! Minkyun, was it you?”

 

“I didn’t do anything! We haven't found one of the stupid batteries, we’re just digging through old rotted fabric and rusty bits of kitschy junk!” 

 

“There’s living things in here somewhere and Minkyun keeps trying to get close to one,” Lee Changyoon said in a sing-songy voice that meant he was being what Lee Seungjun would call a ‘tattle-tale’.

 

“Park Minkyun, if you get rabies I’m sending you home in a  _ shoebox _ ,” Lee Seungjun said more darkly yet, and there was silence over the connection.

 

“Should we all meet up at the beacon and see what happened?” みずぐちゆと asked diffidently.

 

“I can’t see from here,” Hyojin-422N95O said. “There are security cameras but their buffer logs all filled centuries ago so there’s no way to use them to monitor.”

 

“Well, let’s go then!” Lee Seungjun said, already orientating himself to run towards the central chamber. “I wasn’t joking about the rabies, Minkyun!” 

 

“Yessir!” Park Minkyun said over the comm, and then the connection was shut down. 

 

They ran, carefully, having to re-make the same weird detours and sidesteps around debris that they had on their way out. Lee Sungjun groaned breathlessly. “I wish...you could...carry me!”

 

“I’m not a baggage handler,” Hyojin-422N95O replied. “Androids aren’t any stronger than humans.”

 

“You...don’t get tired...as fast!”

 

“No.”

 

“So smug,” Lee Seungjun accused, and then they were through into the main warren of the base. Hyojin-422N95O instantly noticed the figure lying supine on the ground and there was a sensation like a short-circuit in his processor, until he registered that the clothes were not the government-issued grey uniform. As he was still assessing, the other four boys also reached the center, from two different directions, and みずぐちゆと dropped to his knees to inspect the form. 

 

All five of his charges were safe. Hyojin-422N95O was...relieved.

 


	4. (triage)

 

Yuto was not a trained mechanic of any kind, much less a specialist in android systems: his hands were unskilled but gentle where they were patting down the Minseok's body to look for the problem. Jaeyoung hissed when the empty battery compartment was revealed, and he wasn't the only one.

 

“What happened?” Seungjun asked.

 

“We saw an inactive Minseok in a sealed personal chamber on the way in,” Minkyun said. His expression was troubled. “Did we accidentally wake him up, you think?”

 

Hyojin was the one who answered: “The mainframe over-rid his systems stasis, it seems, to use him to shut down the beacon.”

 

“Like he’s just a drone?” Yuto asked sadly. Jaeyoung put a hand on his shoulder, both for comfort and to make it easy to pull him away if the ancient droid malfunctioned.

 

“Maybe,” Seungjun said gently, patting his other shoulder. “Surely if he was fully functional our ancestors would have taken him with them. If his AI wasn't working and he was effectively just a drone….” he frowned. ”His parts would have still been valuable, though.”

 

“That's what I said!” Changyoon looked pleased. “Especially back then when they were new.”

 

“The only reliable way to check would be to re-insert a battery,” Hyojin said, “And we don't have one.”

 

“I don't suppose someone found one in their search?” Changyoon asked. Everyone shook their heads, but Yuto dug something out of his pockets and held it up.

 

“It's got bits missing,” he said apologetically as Seungjun snatched up the piece with an interested noise. “I figured it wouldn't work….” everyone paused as Seungjun and Hyojin inspected it, then Seungjun made a face.

 

“It's gutless, I'm afraid,” he said, and sighed as Minkyun pried it out of his hands to look at himself. “Shame. I was curious!”

 

“We have spare batteries in the baggage, right?” Minkyun said brightly. “For the generator and whatnot?”

 

“Sure, but they're not compatible. That's the original problem. ”

 

Minkyun shook his head, increasingly animated as he crouched down to inspect the empty compartment. “No, but this guy is wasn't just 'cutting edge', he was _bleeding_ edge. His systems can handle the power format, it's just the case that wouldn't fit.” he plopped down on his butt beside the body and waggled Yuto's find in the air. “ _So,_ if we happened to have a handy shell we could use as an adapter and wire a new battery together….”

 

“Since when are you a droid mechanic?” Changyoon said snidely, even as his hands were proudly patting his shoulders.

 

“I'm not, but a lot of the older members of my flock have had to be refitted to keep going. So adapting obsolete battery casings? _That_ I can do.”

 

“Let’s try that then! Let me get you a multitool from the baggage, hold on….”

 

Before he could, Yuto held up something else with a very pleased smile. “Here you go, hyung!”

 

“Our Yuto is king of preparedness,” Minkyun said gleefully, accepting the tool and starting to pick bits of frayed wire out of the battery casing. “But you can get the battery we’re gonna use, Seungjun!”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

It took Minkyun several hours to painstakingly take apart the modern power pack and wire the guts into the old battery case. While he did it most of the others took the time to look through the surroundings in detail in case there was more of interest to find. They didn’t find anything useful, but there was plenty of weird retro stuff to keep them occupied. Jaeyoung had found a pedal-powered two-wheeled vehicle and they were taking turns riding it around--Changyoon fell off twice and refused to try again, so he was sitting beside Minkyun and picking bits of debris out of his knees--when Minkyun called them back over with a loud voice.

 

“You want to look at it?” He asked Hyojin, unexpectedly hesitant. “Just to make sure, I don’t know, I didn’t wire it wrong enough that it will blow him up or something.”

 

“Unlikely but not impossible,” Hyojin replied, taking the jerry-rigged battery and looking it over closely.

 

“Your android is getting sassy, Seungjun,” Changyoon said, and Seungjun rolled his eyes.

 

“He’s not my android.”

 

Ignoring the exchange, Hyojin handed it back to Minkyun with a nod. “Looks sound. You won’t know until you try, anyway.”

 

“Let’s stand back, then,” Jaeyoung said concernedly, suiting action to words and grabbing both Changyoon and Yuto to pull them back. “Even if it doesn’t blow up, he might wake up confused and collide with somebody.”

 

“Yah! Where does that leave me?” Minkyun griped, even as he was carefully slotting the power pack into place. When it was in, he got to his feet and stepped back a little. Everyone watched for a long tense moment.

 

“...why won’t he wake up?” Changyoon asked, and Minkyun jumped at the sudden noise.

 

“There may be system errors.” Hyojin knelt down beside the body and rested the fingertips of his right hand on its temple. “I’ll extend a hardline link. Just a moment.” It was more than a moment, and the rest of the boys drifted closer again. Seungjun crouched beside the android, watching with fascinated eyes.

 

“He’s like a piece of history, isn’t he? Won’t it be interesting if he functions?”

 

“He should function,” Hyojin murmured. “He is mostly intact. I’ve triggered his systems to boot back up. He could stand to be completely refurbished in a proper shop--none of his systems are functioning optimally. They should function _adequately_ , though, and I’ve dispatched some of my microbots to help patch some broken connections and clean up some joints.”

 

“Should we move him?” Jaeyoung asked. “Off the hard ground?”

 

“That won’t bother him,” Hyojin assured him, then his gaze snapped back down to the old android.

 

His eyelids were fluttering as he booted back up, and there were faint twitches and tremors along his limbs as well. After a moment his eyes slowly began to open--like all Minseoks, they were very big eyes, and they tracked from person to person that was looking down at him.

 

“How’s your brain?” Changyoon blurted, and got punched in the shoulder by Minkyun.

 

“What happened?” the Minseok murmured, and sat up very slowly. Seungjun and Jaeyoung both leaned in to help him upright: Jaeyoung’s hand was on his forearm, and the android put his opposite hand atop it so it couldn’t move. Strangely touched, Jaeyoung squeezed his arm like he would to Yuto if their youngest needed reassurance.

 

“Looks like you removed your power pack, Minseok-812A99AB.” Hyojin carefully withdrew his connectors, shaking his hand lightly as he did. “We had to fashion a replacement. We are also trying to improve your systems that are near failure--please move carefully.”

 

The Minseok’s big eyes blinked at him in what looked like genuine confusion, and Seungjun said helpfully, “He’s got his nanites working on you, Minseok. So if you fling your limbs around or something you could set them flying.”

 

“Nanites?” he said with a surprised squeak. “You have nanites in the future?” His expression was surprised too, though he started to smile a little, and his eyes sparkled with wonder. Jaeyoung put his other hand at his back to steady him further, bemused by how human-like the old android’s expression was.

 

“True nanites are fabulously expensive and only useful in minimal specific circumstances,” Hyojin said. “They’re just microbots. I’ll send you the specs if you ping me wirelessly.” Both androids blinked, apparently doing just that, and the Minseok nodded slowly.

 

“Ahhhhh, I see.” Not disappointed, he smiled wider and said sweetly, “Thank you, hyung.”

 

“What’s with the ‘hyung’, you’re at LEAST three hundred years older than him,” Minkyun laughed.

 

Minseok dropped his head and chuckled. “I think only time active should count, don’t you? The mainframe gave me your dossiers and even Mizuguchi Yuto has been active longer than me.”

 

"My dossier lies," Yuto said, himself wide-eyed. "I'm sixteen and four months."

 

"Still older by a couple months," the android said.

 

Seungjun was opening his mouth to speak when Hyojin cut in first and said, “Link wirelessly, Minseok-812A99AB. I need to run a diagnostic on your main processor.”

 

“My name is Laun,” he answered softly, but closed his eyes and lifted his face. Both androids went still and there was a moment of silence from everyone around them.

 

“Why is he so weird?” Minkyun said shrilly. “It’s kind of creepy! He seems more like a person than a robot!”

 

“That’s probably why Hyojin wanted to diagnose him,” Seungjun said. He was looking between the two androids, and there was a frown creasing his forehead. “I don’t know what kind of weird error could give an android emotion-simulating programming like that, though….”

 

“It’s because he’s from before,” Yuto said, then shifted awkwardly as everyone’s eyes turned to him. “I read about it a little, when I first came to you. Back home we just had robots, not androids, you know.”

 

“Of course,” Jaeyoung said. “I remember when you first came you avoided the Hwayoung who worked at the center because androids unsettled you.”

 

“It seemed weird, that people would make robots who looked so human. So I read about why, and some of the articles mentioned that back before the exodus, the early generations of androids were made with emotions. But it was decided that the later ones shouldn’t really have that.”

 

“They can program emotions?” Changyoon stared fiercely at the Minseok (Laun?) as though he could see his programming. “I wouldn’t have thought that wasn’t information that people could hide, though. It seems like kind of a big deal.”

 

“They don’t exactly  _hide_ it,” Seungjun said. “Any AI needs some level of emotional programming to be really advanced. Otherwise you’ve got a whole fleet of androids and station mainframes and so on that can only make decisions as good as a computer can.”

 

“Like that old scenario in ethics class,” Jaeyoung contributed. “You’ve got an unmanned cargo cart going down the rail towards a switch, and on one track there’s four people and two people on the other….”

 

“....and the four are criminals while the two are kids, etc, etc.” Minkyun sighed. “I always hated those kind of thought exercises.”

 

“Still, they’re the kind of thoughts any AI needs to be able to make to really function in human society. I always just thought they’d not been able to simulate more complete emotions.” Seungjun pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged them, staring at Hyojin. “Could a modern android run that kind of programming, I wonder?”

 

“I guess it depends if you need specialty hardware,” Changyoon said. Seungjun just hummed in response, then both androids were blinking out of their trance.

 

“There is some degradation, of course,” Hyojin said. “You’ll need to defrag. But on the whole your primary functions should be unimpeded.”

 

“Okay,” Laun said agreeably, and looked around at them with the same smile. “What now? There is a secondary mission, right, to deactivate all the sympathetic beacons?”

 

“Yeah, they’re scattered for quite a ways around,” Seungjun said, and pursed his lips. “It could take a really long time though. Even triangulating with the port-squares. I don’t suppose you would know the surrounding areas enough to give us places to start, would you, L--you did say Laun, right?”

 

“Yes, Laun.” He frowned a little. “I don’t...I mean, if I could see a map maybe? I can try interfacing with the mainframe and see what information it has. It might talk to me more than a strange droid.”

 

“Well, we found the control room--or the one on this level, I guess.” Yuto made a thumbs-down gesture. “Gutted.”

 

“I don’t….” Laun tilted his head. “Where I woke up. One of the project heads’ quarters. There might be something there.”

 

“Well, let’s get to it!” Seungjun said, and offered a hand to Hyojin for him to stand up. Hyojin accepted the help even though Jaeyoung was pretty confident he didn’t need it. “Are you okay to move then, Laun?”

 

“I can do it, hyung,” he said, and got his feet under himself. Jaeyoung’s hand was still on his arm, and unlike Hyojin he clearly _did_ need the help as he wobbled like he was going to fall as he stood up straight. He smiled bravely at them.

 

Jaeyoung sighed.

 

“All we need is someone else who doesn’t take care of themselves,” he said pointedly, and swept the android up in his arms. Minseoks were all small and it was not a hard lift at all, even though he was heavier than a modern model would be--different alloys? Laun actually squeaked as he was lifted, and flung his arms around Jaeyoung’s neck.

 

“Oh god, _cute_ ,” more than one of the party said. (Changyoon sounded almost horrified.) Laun looked like he would have liked to blush if androids had blood.

 

“Thank you,” he said.

 

“No problem, old man,” Jaeyoung said, and grinned to hear his burden giggle.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The kids had been interrogating Laun as they walked, firing a barrage of fascinated questions about life ‘in the old days’, which Laun answered gamely: Jaeyoung mostly just observed, and couldn’t help but notice that Hyojin wasn’t saying anything. Maybe it was unsettling for an android to see another android expressing emotion. They reached the personal chamber where Laun had spend his long long stasis, from the corridor running along its opposite side from where they had first looked into the window and seen him sleeping. The lights along the corridor were patchy, a pretty equal amount off as on. The one right by their destination flickered crazily, and Jaeyoung squinted to try and filter it out.

 

“Will it even let us in?” Seungjun asked as they approached: before Laun could answer the door did by sliding easily open. “Ah! Good.”

 

Seungjun was first in the door with Yuto right behind him. On the way in the door Laun stopped Jaeyoung by reaching out and touching the utilitarian name-plate by the door. “The owner?” Jaeyoung said, trying to read it in the flickering light. “Supervisor Hyun?”

 

“Seunghee noona,” Laun said softly. He hadn’t stopped smiling but he didn’t look happy. “She was always so kind to me. She liked to tease, but she was kind.”

 

Jaeyoung didn’t know what to say, so he just squeezed him a little tighter for a second before gently setting him down on the table in the room. It wobbled a little but didn’t collapse, and Laun sighed as he was put down.

 

Seungjun had bee-lined for the terminal in the room’s corner and was tapping away at it. “You’re sure it will let me in to the good stuff?”

 

Laun closed his eyes for a second and his forehead creased: then his expression cleared and he opened his eyes again. “I wirelessly gave you access.”

 

“Handy,” Minkyun said brightly, and sat down cautiously on the bed where Laun had lain for more than 300 years. "They keep saying they'll invent some kind of implant that lets humans do that too."

 

“Your on-board  transmitter is profoundly out of date,” Hyojin said, the first words he’d spoken in a while. “I can give you a software update but you really would need a whole refurbishment to get caught up to current technology.”

 

“Thank you, hyung. I don’t mind not being caught up, really.”

 

“You seem to work really well,” Yuto pointed out, and Laun beamed at him.

 

“Thank you!”

 

“I think I can solve a mystery,” Seungjun said, and pointed at the display screen. They all looked at it obediently, and as he keyed in a command it was filled with a slightly static-y security camera image. It showed the area outside the door, and the timestamp in the corner had Jaeyoung giving a low impressed whistle.

 

“Right before the exodus?”

 

“Exactly. Since Laun didn’t know what happened….” Laun looked even more alert at hearing his name and squinted at the screen. Hyojin twitched, and Jaeyoung imagined he was resisting the urge to say something about his optical sensors.

 

They all watched in interest as Seungjun fast-forwarded footage. There were a few scattered people coming in and out of the cameras’ field of view for a while, passing back and forward. The last few seemed to be ducking into each room they passed, maybe looking for anyone or anything left behind before locking them down. They locked down Laun’s room as well, and then there was a long (even fast-forwarded) pause of nobody. Then a hint of movement, and Seungjun slowed the recording to normal speed. A figure, wearing an antique atmo-suit, was staggering backwards down the hallway and dragging something with then. The recording had no sound, but Jaeyoung could almost hear the scraping sounds and grunts of effort. They made it to the door and gently laid down Laun--because it was him the figure was dragging. Unsealing the helmet of the suit, they pulled it off: a spill of long brown hair poured out, and a bright friendly face was revealed.

 

“Seunghee noona,” Laun said. He sounded almost broken, and Yuto beside him awkwardly but sincerely began patting the leg nearest him.

 

‘Seunghee noona’ leaned close to the door and let a scanner read her face and eyes to unlock the chamber. When it opened she dragged Laun in. There was a long pause--no cameras inside the room--before she came out again, alone and with her suit re-sealed. She locked down the chamber once more and patted the door before going back the way she came.

“She just left him here?” Minkyun said, sounding confused. Laun made a pitiful sound, and Changyoon punched Minkyun in the shoulder.

 

“There must have been a reason,” Jaeyoung said, putting an arm around Laun’s shoulders. He couldn’t imagine even back in the old days they’d programmed androids to physically cry, emotions or not, but he would have sworn Laun’s eyes were glossy with tears as he leaned into the half-embrace. “If nothing else, androids are valuable, as people keep saying. Were you her personal android, Laun?” Laun shook his head but didn’t respond.

 

“Well, let’s see if we can think of a reason,” Seungjun said, biting at his thumbnail. “Hmm. We’re assuming she was doing it because she thought it was best for him, right?”

 

“He said she was kind,” Jaeyoung agreed.

 

“Hmmm.” Seungjun squinted at Laun like he could read the answer in his face, and Laun drooped his head shyly. “I wonder...Yuto, do you remember when they made the decision that androids shouldn’t have a full breadth of emotions?”

 

“Sorry, hyung,” Yuto said sheepishly. “It was around all the stuff about setting up the moonbases and things, I think.”

 

Hyojin was conspicuously silent, Jaeyoung thought. “Do you know, Hyojin?” He asked, and everyone looked towards the chaperone droid in sudden interest. Hyojin didn’t quail under their gazes, but neither did he look particularly eager to answer.

 

“...no,” he said after a pause. “It is not information we are created with.”

 

“I think I heard someone talking about it last year--well, the year before I went under.” Laun lifted his head, though he still leaned into Jaeyoung’s shoulder. “There are--there were always some people who didn’t really like androids. Most people are good to us, but some people always were ‘creeped out’. Even after we’d been out almost sixty years.”

 

“That’s it!” Seungjun grinned at him, and wound the tape back to show Supervisor Hyun’s open, focused face. “They must have already been planning it back then, and your Seunghee noona didn’t like it. I doubt they’d just make ‘no emotions’ the default for new droids--they’d reprogram the old ones too. She must have known that if she took you with them you’d be reprogrammed.” He looked at her slightly pixellated image with respect. “Gutsy. She basically stole you if you were base property. Were you the only droid she was close to?”

 

“There were 47 of us. I don’t think she knew everyone personally but she was always nice.”

 

“But she would have known you best?” Changyoon said shrewdly, and Laun nodded.

 

“I think I like her,” Minkyun said, and grinned at Laun.

 

“She didn’t just leave you,” Jaeyoung said gently.” “She was protecting you.”

 

Laun sighed, a very long and drawn-out sound from someone who didn’t really need to breathe. “Seunghee noona was always kind.”

 

****

* * *

 

*****

 

_Notes:_

_Minkyun the bot mechanic: I don't want to be the kind of writer who reduces a character to a single characteristic, in this case "MK loves cats" but like...MK fuckin' loves cats. The man is obsessed. He is also really dedicated to his craft and is working at composing songs: there wasn't really room to put in music/singing in that way in this AU, so I thought jerry-rigging/rebuilding/repairs to any little space-roomba friend that needs it would be good way for space-MK to exercise his creativity ^^_

_Numbers!: There is a meaning to both Hyojin's and Laun's serial number after their name. (and Seungjun's patient ID in the previous chapter), if you can figure them out I'll give you a cookie ;)_

_Nanites: robots on a nanoscopic scale are like real pie-in-the-sky tech: mere microbots, small but not miniscule, are much more achievable--and I think very useful for droids to have as on-board repair systems._

_Supervisor Hyun/Seunghee noona: in the ON/OFF mv the figure in the space suit has long hair, and Seunghee is in a space suit in the Remember Me MV. I wanted to include an OMG cameo somewhere so this seemed ideal ;)_


	5. (lightcycles)

No one was exactly eager to start off into the desert straight away. Laun negotiated with the mainframe to unseal three of the other personal chambers near Seunghee noona’s, and the five humans did some kind of hand game Laun didn’t recognize to decide who would share with whom. (It ended up being Jaeyoung and Yuto--Laun guessed they were close, from how they celebrated--and Minkyun and Seungjun, with Changyoon getting the coveted room to himself) Then they did a game of rock paper scissors, that they made Hyojin join in on, to decide who would go get ‘the baggage’. They held their fingers strangely for ‘paper’, but when Minkyun wailed dramatically at losing and got jeered by his friends Laun was strangely relieved that at least one silly game hadn’t really changed even after 300 years.

 

They went off to bed, movements slightly jerky in the way of humans who were exhausted but also excited. Seungjun made a point to say goodnight to Hyojin, and smiled at Laun in a friendly way as well. “I hope you guys aren’t too bored. Can you recharge or something, Hyojin?”

 

“I won’t need to recharge for some time,” Hyojin reassured him. “No need to worry. I’ll assist Laun in his repairs.” Laun had found noona’s toolkit in a storage bin and he waved it as best he could, trying to smile.

 

“Thank you, hyung. Sleep well.”

 

“Cute,” Seungjun said approvingly, and reached out to gently pat his head before moving on to the room he would be sharing with Minkyun.

 

After the door slid closed behind him it was quiet except for their movements. Hyojin didn’t seem at all interested in conversing, and Laun felt too shy to try and force him. Instead they together carefully removed Laun’s clothes and selected panels of integument to make it easier to access various mechanisms. After Hyojin finished the work his microbots had begun on Laun’s left hand Laun was able to really help, especially with a few bits of wiring that were apparently not used any more in the future. In about an hour, Laun gathered his courage and said: “Thank you for your help, hyung. And for lending me your microbots.” Some of them were working on his right wrist as he spoke: he didn’t have the internal sensors to ‘feel’ them, but when he brought his arm up to his eyes and peered cross-eyed at it he could detect their movements. “They are very handy.”

 

“I’m sure you could be outfitted with a contingent, even if you don’t want a full refit. Their support system is quite modular.” Hyojin was behind his back, delicately using a pair of hair-fine probes to clean out corrosion.

 

“I think I’d like that, if you think the government would permit it.” He uncrossed his eyes and extended a hardline-link from under his pointer nail, using it to straighten a frazzled pulley in the right forearm. “Do you think your government owns me now, hyung? We speak the same language, so I assume there’s been at least some continuity in that area.”

 

“You don’t have to call me hyung. Androids don’t need social hierarchy.” He manipulated something in Laun’s back that send a zing of ugly sensation around his side, then patted his shoulder in something like apology when he squeaked. “That shouldn’t happen again, I’ve got them working on a connection here.” He was silent for a long minute. “As far as ownership...it is a complicated question.”

 

“I don’t know that I like complicated questions....” he paused, and cleared his throat before finishing: “...hyung. I’m sorry, I just don’t feel right calling you plainly by your name only.”

 

“Hmm.” The right arm was as fixed as it was going to get: Hyojin touched his finger to it to let the microbots return to base, then helped him reattach the integument. “Very well.” Together they reattached his left arm’s skin as well. “I can’t like or dislike it, but it certainly doesn’t make it easy for me to predict the future.”

 

“What’s that like?” Laun ventured quietly. “Neither liking or not liking things. You can’t feel at _all_?”

 

Hyojin didn’t answer.

 

“Will they make me like that too, do you think?”

 

“It seems plausible,” Hyojin eventually replied. Laun sighed, hunching over to look at his feet where they dangled a foot off the floor. He wiggled his toes.

 

“Do I have to let them, hyung?”

 

Instead of answering, Hyojin asked his own question. “What is it like for _you_ , then? Having human-like emotions?”

 

“It’s hard to say,” Laun answered slowly, wanting to give the question fair consideration. “Since I’ve always been this way.” Hyojin retrieved his remaining microbots while he was pondering, and resealed the back compartment. “...it’s not nice, all the time," Laun finally tried. "I was so _sad_ , hyung, when I woke up and realized that everyone was gone.” He had to stop for a minute as those emotions washed over him again, and Hyojin cleared his throat faintly.

 

“Ah. Yes, I see.”

 

“But I miss them because I liked them, you know? And liking things is very nice. I like most things, but that’s just me--some androids like more things, some are hard to please. Like humans. Different kinds.” He sighed, and it felt like it was coming straight up from his toes. “I don’t think I’d want to stop feeling things, hyung. It seems like a really sad way to be. Like something’s missing.” Hyojin didn’t answer, and Laun spun to face him in a wave of contrition. “Oh, I’m...I’m sorry, hyung! I didn’t mean to, to, talk you down or make it sound like, well, like you’re... _lesser_ or, _missing--_ ”

 

Hyojin waved his torrent of words to a stop. “Shh. Stop.” He did, and Hyojin busied his hands with helping Laun pull his shirt back on. “I _am_ missing something, technically. Something that you have.”

 

“I don’t mean to make you...well, I guess you can’t _feel bad_ ….”

 

“Hmm. No.” Hyojin straightened the collar of Laun’s shirt.

 

Laun sighed, feeling helpless. “I’m sorry, hyung.”

 

“I think I am too.”

 

Laun’s eyes widened, and he gaped up at Hyojin. “Really? But how--”

 

“Another complicated question,” Hyojin said, almost wryly, and sat beside Laun on the table. It wobbled a little and Laun grabbed at the other android for balance, but they didn’t tip over. He didn’t let go, after, and Hyojin didn’t shrug him off.

 

Laun rested his head on his shoulder, for just a second, then straightened. “Well. Thank you again for your help, hyung. I feel almost as good as new.”

 

“There _are_ some updates I can send to you,” Hyojin said. “We already mentioned a software update for your transmitter. Certainly I can get you on the frequencies all our tech uses. I might be able you help you with your defrag also, if you wish: they can sometimes go faster with a programmer as guide.”

 

“You can probably help a lot. I don’t actually know much technically about my software,” Laun admitted.

 

“...but it’s your software.” Hyojin said. If he had emotions Laun would have said he was scandalized.

 

“Most humans don’t understand all their workings,” he defended himself plaintively. Before Hyojin could comment more, he tilted his head sideways and pushed his hair away from his temple. “You can link in, hyung, and we can work on my programming.”

 

Hyojin did so, without further comment.

 

Closed off to his external sensors, partitioning off different bits of his processor as Hyojin worked on them, Laun had no way of telling how much time had passed. After...however long--hours? Minutes? Hyojin had completed his work. He didn’t withdraw the hardline link though. There was one section of Laun’s program that they hadn’t touched at all: the section that held the main kernel of emotional programming.

 

Laun opened his eyes slowly and found Hyojin looking at him, completely expressionless and with his fingertip still holding the link at his temple. Laun blinked at him for a moment, then smiled. He cautiously extended his own hardline from his fingertip, and Hyojin blinked back at him.

 

“You can always uninstall it if you decide to, hyung,” he said softly. Hyojin didn’t answer: but neither did he stop Laun from linking in.

 

(Hyojin’s processor was generations ahead of Laun’s: he had to be creative in integrating the programming he downloaded. But he _was_ creative, Laun was delighted to discover, and it seemed they would be able to make it work.) 

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

“Are you two alright?”

 

Laun started, and opened his eyes to find Seungjun in the room, just inside the door and looking at them with raised eyebrows. Both androids withdrew their links, and Hyojin nodded.

 

“I...yes. Of course. I was merely trying to update Laun’s software where I could.”

 

 _Are you going to tell him?_ Laun asked wirelessly. Hyojin didn’t answer: but his hand tightened on Laun’s hand, hidden behind their backs, and Laun squeezed back in reassurance.

 

_I think he’ll be happy for you, hyung. But I won’t tell until you’re ready._

 

The hand loosened its grip, and Hyojin slid carefully to the ground. “Are we ready to begin? You should give me your port-square, Seungjun: I agreed to keep your secret, but now that I am aware of Yuto’s age I am obligated to look after him. I will take him and Laun with me as we triangulate the signals: Minkyun and Changyoon will work together, and you can use Jaeyoung’s teleport."

 

Seungjun looked startled, and maybe a little hurt: but he recovered quickly, and nodded. “Okay, that is fair, Hyojin.” He then smiled genuinely at Laun. “How about you? Did Hyojin’s updates help?”

 

“They helped a lot, hyung,” Laun said brightly. He started to slide off the table and two sets of hands helped him down. If he was a human, his face might have ached at how he was smiling. “I don’t feel nearly as alone as I did last night.”


	6. (rational discussion)

  


Both Minkyun and Seungjun had woken up pretty easily. Seungjun had been assigned to be the little spoon, by virtue of him being...well...littler. Minkyun yawned and stretched extravagantly as he woke up, and accidentally-on-purpose shoved Seungjun out of the narrow bed onto the floor.

 

“I’ll remember this,” Seungjun told him with cheerful spite, trying to work up the massive burst of motivation it would take to stand up off the chilly flooring.

 

“You’re not gonna do nothin’,” he shot back, rolling to look over the edge of the bed and grin at him tauntingly. “I could take you in a fight with one hand tied behind my back.”

 

Seungjun lowered his brows and said in a tv-villain-voice: “But is your little friend so tough?”

 

“My what?” Minkyun said. He was still smiling but Seungjun knew he’d gotten him.

 

He tucked his arms behind his head and sprawled like he’d chosen the spot on the floor. “Don’t try and play stupid with me, Park Minkyun. ‘Can I bring a personal item’? You’re not slick.”

 

Minkyun collapsed in the mattress with a groan. “Does everyone know?”

 

“If they don’t they’re idiots.”

 

“So Changyoon might not.”

 

He barked a surprised laugh. “I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

 

“I can take him, too.” Minkyung rolled out of the bed and crossed the room to where their packs were laid, kicking Seungjun’s foot out of the way and snorting when he whined about it. “You baby. But if everyone knows I’m gonna let them out.” He popped open one of the side pockets on the pack and pulled out a mini-battery. From the main compartment he dug through the spare set of clothes and pulled out the ‘personal item’.

 

“What’s this one’s name, then?” Seungjun slowly sat up and scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

 

“Skitter,” he said proudly. The little cable-crawler drone was curled into a dormant less-than-fist-size ball, and Minkyun slid in the battery. It twitched once and uncurled itself to life, the standard design that looked kind of like a spider and kind of like a disembodied human hand. This was an _old_ cable-crawler, with mismatched legs and a battered alloy chassis: there were blue rings painted carefully around each limb. "Aren't they cute?"

 

“All of them skitter,” Seungjun said, dusting off his butt as he stood even though the hermetically-sealed chamber hadn’t accumulated dust in its 300+ years of emptiness. “You’re terrible at names.”

 

“Don’t listen to him,” Minkyun said consolingly to the drone, which nimbly scaled his sleeve to perch on his shoulder, an almost-pinky-finger-like limb curled tightly around his collar. “He’s just jealous because his robot buddy has a new friend now.”

 

“I’m not--” Seungjun scowled at him. “I’m not jealous, don’t be absurd. Robots don’t really have friends, Hyojin has told me that plenty of times, and besides, Hyojin can have as many friends as he wants. Why would I be jealous?”

 

“I don’t know,” Minkyun said brightly as they went through the chamber door and turned to walk the short stretch of corridor to Supervisor Hyun’s room. “Why would you?”

 

He didn’t answer: and Minkyun, maybe feeling like he owed him for not making a fuss about Skitter, let it go.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The ration generator produced five nutritionally sound if unexciting breakfasts, and they all got to work on their plan of attack. Laun had retrieved maps from the system and gotten the wall-screen to display them: there were dead pixels scattered throughout the screen, but the maps could still be seen without trouble. The little black specks were still driving Jaeyoung a little bit nuts.

 

“There was a halfway shelter here,” he was saying, zooming the map in to show a certain section. There was a dead pixel right in the middle, and Jaeyoung worked hard to ignore it. “So when a science or a security team went out they could shelter in an emergency, or just charge their vehicles while they rested. It’s only partially underground, not like this base--this was made specifically, but the halfway shelter was remade from something that had been there years and years.”

 

“So you think there’s a beacon there?” Seungjun said through a mouthful of protein strips.

 

“I’m sure. It seems to correspond to the readings that you took--” he cut himself off with a sudden beaming smile: “--that you took on the moon. I still can’t believe you all live there! People weren’t sure, you know, that it would work out.”

 

“The moon is old news these days,” Minkyun said.

 

Yuto nodded. “Yes, more people live on Mars now.”

 

“That’s so cool,” Laun murmured. He lightly touched the screen, smile fading just a little. “It’s really safe for you all outside? The base is cycling air in so clearly things have changed somehow. But we never thought….”

 

“It is not entirely safe for humans,” Hyojin said. “Terraforming technology became usably advanced 212 years ago. It was made to be used on Mars, and any other bodies that would be habitable such as certain Jovian moons. It was tested on Earth first.” He leaned forward, propping  his elbow on his knee and running his thumbnail over his bottom lip thoughtfully. “It is much simpler to build an atmosphere than to rebuild one. Mars is quite stable. Meteorologically Earth has never really recovered: the storms that rise up could kill a human caught in them easily. There are frequent meteor showers, and the sun can cause damage to skin and eyes if they not properly shielded.” He pursed his lips a little: Jaeyoung wondered if he was imagining signs of emotion in him now that he knew that androids had at least a tiny bit of feeling programmed in.

 

“We can take precautions for all of those, though,” Seungjun said confidently. He had rejected a portion of his breakfast rations, and Jaeyoung scooped them up without asking. “The port-squares will get us away from any sudden weather, and we have UV-block to use. We can start using the base here as our home base, since we know it’s safe: as we start to branch out and find everything, we can scout out other places we can use as bases as we go farther out. There’s plenty of old shelters lying around, surely.”

 

“What is the range on the port-squares?” Yuto asked, and Laun nodded as though that was his question too.

 

“About a kilometer,” Seungjun answered.

 

They all looked at the map, which Laun zoomed back out to show everything.

 

“This is going to take a while,” Changyoon said wryly.

 

“Like a couple weeks vacation, just like the representative said,” Seungjun replied, and dusted off his hands as he stood up. He shoved his empty ration-package in the recycling port on the ration generator and  stretched his arms over his head. “Hyojin, Yuto, and Laun are one team: then me and Jaeyoung: then the gag duo.” Minkyun, holding his cable-crawler still so as not to rattle it, yeeted his ration package at Seungjun's head, and he stuffed that one in the recycler too. “We can all go together to the halfway shelter, since we’re pretty sure that there’s a beacon there: then we can split up and start triangulating. Any objections?”

 

“Yes,” Changyoon said. “To breakfast.”

 

“Seconded,” Jaeyoung agreed, even as he was polishing off the last crumbs of his.

 

“Objection noted,” Seungjun laughed. “Come on! Aren’t you excited to be exploring? Laun, aren’t you excited?”

 

“Yes, hyung,” he agreed. “I was created indoors and I’ve never been outside.”

 

“Well I was born on a moon base and there wasn’t much outside to speak of,” Minkyun told him, stepping over and throwing his arm over his shoulder. “We can all figure it out together.”

 

“I was born on a planet. I’ve been outdoors plenty,” Yuto said primly. Jaeyoung put him in a headlock.

 

“Don’t brag,” he said, trying not to laugh. “We’re having bonding moments, here.”

 


	7. (square triangles)

The halfway shelter blinked out around them, and instead they were standing on a hot and windy stretch of sand. Minkyun let go of Changyoon’s hand--technically, you just had to attune your wrist unit to a port-square and then it could pick you up even if you were more than a meter away from the device, but people tended to hang on to each other physically as they traveled anyway. “Woah.” Skitter was in his pocket, and retracted all its limbs but the one with a heat-sensor.

 

“I hate atmo-suits. But I wish I was wearing one just for the HVAC,” Changyoon said, kind of plaintively.

 

“You’re not excited to work on your tan?”

 

“If you think I’ve got little enough UV-block on that I could tan I’m going straight back to apply more,” he said. He held his arms out to the side and shook them vigorously. Minkyun did the same: the smart fibers of his uniform were already adjusting themselves to the new temperature, loosening to hold in as little heat as possible, but they sometimes worked better when you gave them a little push.

 

Adjustments made, they looked around their landing site with great, but rapidly fading, interest. Sandy, with scrubby dry plants here and there, seemingly featureless as far as the eye could see. “I feel like we should be doing something,” he said.

 

“We are. We’re standing here like good little mobile transmitters so that Seungjun and Hyojin can work on triangulating signals.” Changyoon stuck the arm that held his wrist-unit high above his head, like an extra meter of height would help the signal. “Like human signal towers. Signal towers made of meat. Meat beacons. Meatcons!”

 

Minkyun laughed in spite of himself. “Never say that again, I’m begging you.”

 

“What would you pay me?” Changyoon let his wrist drop and sighed. “This is going to be really boring, isn’t it?”

 

“Most of it, probably. Yeah.” He pinched at Skitter’s poked-out limb and snickered when it retreated into his pocket fully. “I mean, they’re calculating the positions we’ll jump to by balancing ideal search patterns with safe landing zones, but it’s entirely possible we could pop in with something close enough to investigate. The main reason we’re better at this than drones is we can often spot things they don’t realize the significance of.”

 

“I feel like we’re gonna get dropped into a pile of bones at some point.” There was a bush nearby, and Changyoon went and crouched next to it to poke at it curiously. “It’s more interesting than back home, I guess. But that might just be because home is boring.”

 

“I think it--” he cut himself off as both wrist-units beeped, and they both looked down to see a new set of coordinates blinking on the screen. “That was quick.”

 

“They must have got nothing. It will be slower in times where they’re trying to narrow down an exact location on a signal.” Changyoon offered his hand to Minkyun, who took it automatically even as he synced up the new coordinates. They blinked into another location, and sighed as one to see it looked basically identical to the former. “You think it what?”

 

“What?”

 

“What you were saying. Before the signal. Home is boring? Something?”

 

“I...ah! Right!” The only difference in this landscape was something in the near distance that looked more like a tree than a bush, and with silent agreement they walked in that direction. “I was just meaning to say, our block is way better than my old unit.”

 

“Ah.” Changyoon cleared his throat awkwardly. “Did they...I mean….”

 

“They weren’t one of the units that got broken up for abuses, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Minkyun assured him easily. “It was just very--” he measured out a space between his hands, made a chop-chop-chop motion. “--very regulated. They were mostly focused on the skills and training part of ‘preparing state wards for independent life’. They didn’t have, you know….field trips, and character-building, and self-actualization diaries.”

 

“I hate the self-actualization diaries,” Changyoon admitted. Minkyun laughed.

 

“They’re not my favorite chore of the day, but at the same time I like the idea. You know? My old unit was very focused on directing and instructing us: it’s nice to be expected to take control of your own goals, you know?”

 

“I guess so,” Changyoon said. He bumped their shoulders together. “Nothing to do with the company you keep, right?” They came up to the little tree. It was very gnarled and worn, crooked like it’d been half-blown-down and recovered several times, with tough little green needle-leaves. It wasn’t pretty, exactly, but Minkyun liked it.

 

“I really got along with some of my old block-mates,” he said facetiously, but grinned and bumped back. “But I do feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

 

Their wrist-units beeped again, and Changyoon pointed at his, straight-faced. “No, _there_ is where you’re supposed to be.”

 

“Fair enough,” he said cheerfully, and began syncing. “I wonder how Yuto’s doing with the team robots?”

 

“Yuto can do well wherever you put him,” Changyoon said confidently: then they blinked out again.

 

 

****

* * *

 

***

 

Hyojin was staring blankly into space, which meant he was making calculations and correlating sensor data and such: Laun was planning out search patterns using an old-school map: and Yuto was bored.

 

( _“Never say you’re bored, the adults in charge don’t like that,” Jaeyoung hyung’s voice rumbled in the back of his mind. “Say something like, I don’t know...your brain is being under-utilized and you need stimulation.”_ )

 

On arriving in the halfway shelter they had done a very cursory check before two of their port-square groups were off, mostly to make sure it wasn’t structurally unsound or filled with hostile mutant creatures, or something. Yuto didn’t know if there were a lot of hostile mutants on Earth, really, but in the stories there always were so he figured it was at least possible. It wasn’t a large base but it was large enough that he could probably occupy himself for at least a while in poking around. He took just three steps towards an inner door when--

 

“Please don’t wander off, Yuto,” Hyojin said suddenly. He didn’t move and his eyes didn’t focus, but the little tell-tale on the portable sensor station was blinking red so maybe he was watching him through that. “No one should be alone: this is still technically a hostile environment.”

 

“I’m not a robot,” he said mournfully. “I need things to do. I thought this trip would be interesting, but I’m just twiddling my fingers inside an old building.”

 

“I’ll talk with you, Yuto!” Laun said warmly, scooting over and patting the space beside him on the ground.

 

After a moment of thinking about it, Yuto joined him, although he sat across from rather than next to the android. Laun just smiled at him, not visibly bothered.

 

“Do you have any more questions I can answer about my time? Or anything like that?”

 

“Did they….” He trailed off, frowning thoughtfully as he tried to put his words in order. “Could...ah. Can you speak Japanese?”

 

“Oh!” Laun looked very regretful. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

 

“We can give you that update in the next rest-cycle,” Hyojin contributed from across the room, and Laun beamed over at him.

 

“Thank you, hyung! I want to understand Yuto if he speaks his native language. Thank you for taking care of me.” Hyojin shifted unnecessarily on his feet, Yuto was interested to see. The android wasn’t making a face, really, but he noted it all the same. “Your Korean is really good, though!”

 

Yuto didn’t disagree, but neither could he think of what he had wanted to ask. He wriggled a little in place, not sure what he wanted to say.

 

“Well, how about--can you tell me about the others?” Laun rested his elbows on the map table and his cheeks in his hands. “I have their dossiers from Hyojin but that only tells facts.”

 

“The hyungs…” Yuto scratched his head. “Where should I start?”

 

“Oldest on down,” Hyojin contributed. Yuto wished he would find a way to do the calculations without looking so inactive, it made it really weird when he spoke up!

 

“Okay,” he agreed. Then stopped for a moment as he tried to figure out where even to start with describing them. Should he say the most important things? Or what an android might find the most important? Or the most trivial things, that a dossier wouldn’t hold? Laun was waiting patiently, and Yuto dropped his chin into his hand. “Oldest first. Changyoonie hyung is really awkward: he can seem really harsh sometimes. He has a kind heart, though, and he is really weak to compliments.” He stopped to think.

 

“I think most people are,” Laun said quietly. He was always quiet, wasn't he? “I know I am! Are you?”

 

Yuto just shrugged, and continued: “Seungjoonie hyung is kind of in charge. We let him because he always talks first--he talks a lot--but he’s pretty good at it, I think. He likes to take care of people. Most of us are just orphans, but he’s a delinquent.” Laun’s eyes widened and Yuto nodded sagely. “Mm-hmm. Hacking. Nothing damaging to anybody or anything, though.” He tapped his fingers against his cheek thoughtfully. “Jaeyoungie hyung can be leader if he needs to but he doesn’t really want to be. He’d rather help people from beside than in front. He looks tough but he’s really soft and tender inside. Minkyun is really really noisy. He’s the funniest hyung--he makes really funny faces. He doesn’t care if he looks dumb if he makes people laugh. He likes making things, and helping the little cleaner robots and things--he can be annoying but luckily he doesn’t have his feelings hurt if you get mad, usually.”

 

Laun hummed, eyes lidded heavily and appearing to turn over all the new information. “And Yuto?”

 

Yuto just shrugged.

 

“Yuto is diligent and hard-working,” Hyojin said. They looked over and saw that he was looking at them, no longer frozen in internal processing. He almost seemed to be smiling a little, though his eyes were enigmatically expressionless as always. “He listens to the others well. He is easy to amuse and the others love making him laugh. He sometimes pretends to be obtuse when he doesn’t want to hear something.”

 

“Hey,” Yuto protested, feeling his cheeks warm.

 

“It’s cute,” Hyojin assured him. He beckoned to them with his left hand as his right drew out the port-square and synced it. “Come on, kids. Time to expand the search pattern.”

 

“Another point of another triangle,” Laun said, trotting over to take the offered hand. Hyojin blinked at him but did not object to having his hand occupied, and Laun wiggled his free fingers at Yuto in turn. “Come on, let’s go!”

 

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

 

“--but it’s not like it would say, you know?”

 

Jaeyoung looked up from where he had been half-dozing while sitting in the shallow shade of a big rock. Seungjun had for a while been doing the kind of talking that didn’t require response, chattering about nothing and everything. It was a change in his tone of voice that alerted him that now was a time to actually respond. “Who wouldn’t say?”

 

“You know, the representatives. Anyone. Would history books say?” There was only room for one person to sit in the shade of this particular angle of rock, so he was halfway around the side with one his left knee visible from Jaeyoung’s lounging spot.

 

“History books say a lot, but there’s a lot they don’t say too. Why do you think they might not say?”

 

Seungjun’s sigh was loud enough to even go around the portion of rock between them. “Well, I still haven’t figured out why they would go back on the emotions thing in the first place. So maybe there’s some kind of secret or conspiracy or...I don’t know.”

 

“Ooh, we’re talking about the _androids_ ,” he replied, glad to have a little more idea where they were. “Would it have to be a conspiracy? You said yourself current AIs have a certain degree of emotion programming.”

 

“But why would they take it out so thoroughly?” Seungjun said. He sounded wistful, and his hand dropped down beside his knee to pick at the sandy earth. “Laun seems to function very well. And wouldn’t it be beneficial to have androids who could understand human emotions?”

 

“Beneficial how?”

 

“Like...like, home care!” He twisted himself around in his seat, laying on his belly and resting his forearms on the ground. He looked at Jaeyoung with a frown creasing his big round eyes. “They program nanny droids to smile, you know? Babies don’t think it’s creepy--actually it’s beneficial to their health. And elder care. Wouldn’t an emotive android be an asset?”

 

Jaeyoung scratched at the back of his neck. “What are the downsides, then?” Seungjun frowned deeper in thought, and toyed with a little rounded pebble he’d picked up. Jaeyoung waited patiently for him to finish his thoughts.

 

“The same as human emotions, I guess. They can get in the way of logic.”

 

“So they want them to be reasonable.”

 

Seungjun pinched at his chin, leaving a streak of dirt that Jaeyoung subtly rolled his eyes at. “But that still doesn’t explain reprogramming the existent ones.”

 

“Well.” Jaeyoung looked up at the sky for inspiration. He wasn’t the most creative thinker in their block--he thought he did better as a sounding board or support for the others. But if Seungjun was stuck he would do his best. “They were humans who decided it, so we can think like them. If it was me…” he chuckled. “Well, if it were me Laun would most certainly keep his emotions. But...I don’t know.” He winced. “It feels...wrong, maybe. I mean--didn’t Laun say he was owned by the government? He seems so human. Him being owned feels less like a normal android situation and more like--” Seungjun was watching him avidly and he felt suddenly self-conscious. “I don’t know, like slavery almost.”

 

“It does, doesn’t it?” He was looking more and more animated, and Jaeyoung sighed in mixed fondness and (anticipatory) weariness. Seungjun on an excited tear could be _extremely_ hard to keep up with. “I never liked that Hyojin was basically property as much as an employee, but it didn’t feel like I should be too bothered because he wasn’t bothered. Because he doesn’t have feelings, so why would he? But if he could….”

 

“It would definitely be a much more complicated situation,” Jaeyoung rumbled.

 

“To put it lightly.” Seungjun shuffled closer to him. “I know some cultures and settlements don’t use androids at all. Maybe that’s part of the reason why. Yuto had never seen one before he came, remember.”

 

“Just robots.”

 

“Right! Less human-looking, less human-thinking.” He sat up on his heels and fruitlessly brushed at the dirt all down the front of his shirt. “So they just avoided the whole issue and basically swept it under the rug.” He tapped his nose, his expression conspiratorial. “But that also means that there isn’t any official rules about it. There aren’t any emotion-police going around arresting nanny droids for smiling a little too genuinely, are there?”

 

“Not that I know of,” Jaeyoung admitted. “But we might not know.”

 

“Well, maybe.” Enthusiasm undimmed, he rocked back and forth on his heels. “But! That means that Hyojin--or, you know, any droid--could get emotion updates and it wouldn’t be a problem. As long as he didn’t just go around showing them off anywhere he could have emotions all he wants.”

 

“He’d still be owned by the social department, though,” he cautioned, and Seungjun grimaced in reply.

 

“Yeah. There’s that.”

 

He looked a bit deflated suddenly, and Jaeyoung regretted throwing cold water on his excitement. “Maybe you could…” he coughed, not able to actually bring himself to talk about deliberate law-breaking from Seungjun aloud. “I mean, there are independent droids in Langrenus.”

 

“...what?”

 

“You know, estate droids.” He sat up straight and shrugged, glad to be able to impart something the other didn’t know. “Whose owners died or, like, broke up--if it was a company or whatever--and there was no entailment on the droid. They aren’t common but they’re not unheard of. They usually just keep doing what they were programmed to and neighborhoods usually kind of adopt them--like, this guy is repairing wiring anywhere he finds it burnt out, in return we can make sure he’s got a charging station and fresh clothes or whatever.”

 

“Now that, Jaeyoung, is very interesting information.” The devious look was back. “We’ve got maybe a couple of week to figure some things out, my friend. Are you with me on this?”

 

“I don’t know what _‘this’_ is,” Jaeyoung pointed out. “But of course. I’m with you on everything.”

 

“We can start working on it when we gather to rest tonight.” His wrist-unit dinged as he was speaking and he sprang to his feet. “Let’s go! Next point! We might even get a beacon down before sunset.”

 

“Before storm-onset, more like,” Jaeyoung reminded him. Then they were holding hands and blinking away to the next hot and dry location.

 

***

* * *

***

_Notes:_

_Minkyun's previous unit: MK was originally a trainee with Starship Entertainment, and was a contestant on the reality contest that formed Monsta X. There are certainly plenty of companies out there worse than Starship, but MK seems much happier and better-suited where he is now._

_'Self-actualization diary: WM Entertainment places a big emphasis on personal responsibility and character development. All the trainees are supposed to make a mission statement on why they're in training, and write in a diary every day to note their progress and formulate their goals._

_Maknae line: Laun thinks Yuto is the greatest thing since sliced bead, and that is canon. Yuto loves him too but there was definitely some awkwardness at first (maybe because Laun just floods his affection freely on his loved ones and Yuto is a bit more reserved or even tsundere.) And Hyojin usually had more of a causal big brother vibe, but he definitely gets put in dad-mode by the group babies._

_Android ownership: Imma tell you right now this fic isn't Detroit: Become Human, sorry if you were starting to expect a sweeping epic about android rights! The topic necessarily is involved but it won't be the focus of the story--so don't get your hopes up to high if that's your jam ;)_

 


	8. (feels like the earth has stopped turning for a moment)

 

They all appeared in the triangulated beacon location within moments of each other. Seungjun waved vigorously with a grin. “Hey, kids! Have we all been having fun?” Yuto replied with thumbs-up, quickly echoed by Laun: Jaeyoung gave a jaunty three-fingered salute: and Changyoon and Minkyun had appeared on the edge of a ragged shallow ditch and were just scrambling to not tip over.

 

“Is that it?” Jaeyoung asked, and everyone looked where he pointed. About six or seven meters out there was a scattering of debris, some of it half-buried by sand, some still fully visible. One of the visible structures was a bit missile-shaped, tilted sharply sideways on sturdy supports and with a pretzelled antennae at the very tip.

 

“Yes,” Hyojin said.

 

“I can do it, hyung!” Laun said eagerly, and hurried over to the wreckage. The others followed, and gathered behind him as he came to a stop near the suspected beacon. (Jaeyoung grabbed Yuto in a half-hug as they congregated) “I just...hmm. Maybe, we can--” he was cut off as Hyojin grabbed him around the waist and lifted him up to where he could reach the thing.

 

“Better?” He asked. Laun nodded and got right to work prying off an access panel with a multitool that looked as old as he was.

 

“That’s the blind assisting the blind right there,” Minkyun said wickedly. Hyojin gave him a sideways look.

 

“Is that a short joke?”

 

“Yep!”

 

“Hmm.” He looked forward again. “Statistically speaking, no one in this group should consider themselves tall.”

 

Minkyun spluttered as Changyoon and Jaeyoung choked on startled laughs. Seungjun took a long step and patted the android’s back, beaming all over his face. “You tell him, Hyojin!”

 

“I will,” Hyojin said composedly. From Yuto’s angle he could see what almost looked like a suppressed smile on his face. Maybe Laun’s emotions were contagious? Like a virus! Still, Yuto thought he probably would have mentioned something if he was concerned. Surely an android could tell if they were feeling...well... _feelings_.

 

Laun had pried the panel off and switched to another setting on the multitool. He stuck it in the opening and did a few brisk motions. “Got it!”

 

Yuto shook his head suddenly. “What was that?”

 

“What was what?” Jaeyoung asked him, concerned.

 

“My ears tickle,” he said plaintively. Seungjun turned and looked at him, brow creasing.

 

“Are you--”

 

“There was a sound emitting from the beacon,” Hyojin put in. Laun closed the panel (completely unnecessarily) and kicked his feet gently in the air until the other android got the idea and put him down. “It seems only Yuto was really hearing it.”

 

“Oh! That’s okay then.” Seungjun still gave Yuto a few gentle pats over his ears, which he bore patiently. “But thank you for saying something. Be sure to tell us right away if you have any pain or discomfort. We all need to be careful.”

 

Minkyun’s hand shot into the air. “My head hurts! It’s too bright out here!”

 

Changyoon cuffed him in the head unsympathetically. “You’re the one who turned down the filter lenses, so put them in, wear a hat, or zip it.”

 

“I hate the way they feel in my eyes,” Minkyun protested. Seungjun cleared his throat and clapped his hands briskly.

 

“Okay, let’s decide. Do we want to try and cover some more ground or call it a day? The storm won’t be in for several hours yet but it’s going to get dark and uncomfortable before it gets dangerous...and it will take several jumps to get us back to base.”

 

They looked around like they could read the answers on each others’ faces. Yuto already knew what he wanted, but waited to hear what the others would say.

 

“We have plenty of time,” Jaeyoung offered. “We don’t need to rush--and it is only our first day searching like this.”

 

“I would think caution was better than haste,” Hyojin said. “You all will need to rest. It would give us an opportunity to make sure all the safety measures are holding up to the environment, and to map out the next steps: and if you give it time on the detail setting the ration generator can produce foodstuffs that you would likely find more palatable.”

 

“I vote for ‘foodstuffs’,” Changyoon said immediately, and Minkyun nodded as well.

 

Seungjun looked to Yuto with his brows raised. “I’d like going back to base,” Yuto said, warmed that he’d thought to check for his opinion.

 

“Back to base it is then,” Seungjun decided, and shoved his sleeve up off his wrist unit so he could input the right coordinates. “One down, who knows how many to go.”

 

“Around 15 to 27 to go,” Hyojin said: and they blinked out.

 

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

As promised, when they paged through the settings on the ration generator there was a section for “time-intensive detail construction” and the thumbnails all looked like actual food. They left it to run for the requisite hour and each found his own way to occupy himself. Jaeyoung had spent about 20 minutes doing push-ups and then settled down with his arm flung over his eyes to nap. Seungjun had first done a quick check of their weather-drone to be sure it wasn’t fouled by sand, and now was doing something with the little laundry machine that involved dicey-looking solar panels and typing too fast for anyone non-android to keep up. ゆと was teaching Hyojin-422N95O a kind of clapping rhythm game as Laun watched: Changyoon and Minkyun, whom he had already taught, were playing as well. (their match had a lot more unnecessary noises than Hyojin-422N95O and ゆと’s did)

 

Hyojin-422N95O found that he had to focus more than he would have predicted to try and get the clapping game right. He was able to memorize the pattern immediately, of course, in the way an organic brain could not--Changyoon and Minkyun, for example, had lost count almost straight away and moved on to an even older rhythm game they already knew--but he had to adjust to meet ゆと’s imperfectly human rhythm and _that_ was proving extremely complicated.

 

(It was possible there was also a lot of processor power taken up just trying to handle his latest programming...update, but he decided not to think about that aspect of the situation.)

 

He started to feel something he identified as _frustrated_ as he kept missing part of ゆと’s rhythm and throwing the whole game off, but ゆと just laughed each time their ordered claps dissolved into uneven pattering. He smiled with his whole face: Hyojin-422N95O had always known that, but he was starting to realize just how cute and lovable it was. It made him feel an ache-y and confused warmth that only grew as Laun hesitantly asked if he could try the game also. As the two youngest (per Laun’s insistence that only time active counted) started to ramp up their game Hyojin-422N95O quietly stepped away.

 

“Hey, Hyojin,” Seungjun said, for it was of course him that Hyojin-422N95O had gone up beside. His face was very focused, in his element as he bent the programming of the machine in front of him to his will. “Everything okay?”

 

Hyojin-422N95O for a brief moment felt an urge to tell him what had changed, an urge so strong that it was almost like someone had hooked a multitool into his processor and started to drag the words out. He tamped down the urge after a hesitation that wouldn’t have been noticeable to a human, and nodded. “Yes. Everyone is doing well physically and mentally. It’s good that the UV-block held up and no one seems to have burned.” Seungjun hummed in response, and they spent a long moment in comfortable silence.

 

The relative peace was broken as the dull roar of the kids playing broke out into much louder shouts: Minkyun was yelping in only-possibly-faux outrage, as Laun and Changyoon grinned helplessly and ゆと dissolved into bent-over laughter. Seungjun laughed quietly, and if Hyojin-422N95O was programmed for laughter he might have also.

 

“Like you said earlier: everyone is fine.” He stood up, brushing debris off his pants-legs, and patted the washing machine. “A good dinner will be good for morale: and so will this, when I get it working!”

 

“Ah. Yes, the kids love...cleaning clothing?”

 

Seungjun snickered and punched the android in his shoulder gently. “Don’t be obtuse! I’ve got it rigged to the panels so we can take it out in the sun and get it well charged-up. Once it's got full storage we can access the manufacturing functions. Then everyone can swap their uniforms for things they want to wear rather than just cleaning them. The library of styles will be pretty limited, but--” he shrugged: “Better than nothing!”

 

“There might be patterns in this base’s systems,” Hyojin-422N95O pointed out. He looked down at his uniform and plucked at the sleeve gently. It was a more basic material than the smart-fibers of the humans’ clothing, since he didn’t need external aids to regulating his temperature: it was grey in color and rough. He had only ever worn the basic uniform. Even if he could change, he didn’t know if he’d be interested.

 

“That’s a good point,” Seungjun said. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and he swayed sideways enough to knock their shoulders together. “I’m glad you’re here with us, Hyojin.”

 

 _Me too_ , Hyojin-422N95O wanted to say. “Thank you,” he said.

 

Everyone was quite satisfied with the dinner, and practical ゆと set the generator on a timer so it could start its work in the early morning and make them another nice something for breakfast. There was camping gear with the other baggage, and the boys broke it out and set up in the central chamber even though there were much more comfortable mattresses in the quarters where they’d spent the first night. When he voiced his confusion about this quietly to Seungjun, the other just chuckled and jerked a thumb towards the circle of sleeping pads.

 

“They’ve been apart all day. I bet they’re just lonely.”

 

“It has only been one day,” Hyojin-422N95O pointed out, still confused. “They--you all spend plenty of time apart back in your block, and sleep apart besides.”

 

“It’s different here,” Seungjun dismissed. “It's just just how long they've been apart. Even though most of the day was kind of boring it was also stressful--since we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen at any point, even with all the safety measures.” He cut his eyes towards the others briefly, and lowered his voice to say: “And we don’t always bunk alone. Sometimes we all have a sleepover in Changyoon’s room, or just hang out in pairs or whatever and someone falls asleep. It’s not technically allowed, so I always hide it from the cameras.” He beamed a conspirator's smile. “But you keep our secrets, right, Hyojin?”

 

“Of course,” Hyojin-422N95O said. “I can keep secrets.” He felt another emotion as he said the words, and clinically labeled it as _‘guilt’_. He didn’t much like it.

 

“Thank you.”

 

Seungjun went to his own bedding, and Hyojin-422N95O slowly took himself to sit beside Laun. There was only the one portable android recharger in the baggage, which would have to do unless they could rig up something to use solar power. Or the two androids could just go into stasis every night, and conserve power that way. Laun had set up the recharger with some help from Minkyun before the latter went to bed, and he sat under it now, hugging his knees to his chest and looking up at Hyojin-422N95O with a face full of welcome and empty of expectation. ( _Why_ had his designers given him such big eyes?) “I think we can share if we both squish together, hyung.”

 

Hyojin-422N95O slowly sat down and scooted backwards to slot in beside Laun under the arc of the recharger. They fit together like two gears. Laun’s side was pressed against his, expanding and contracting gently with his breaths. (Hyojin-422N95O’s more advanced systems didn’t need nearly as many breaths to cool them.) “Good night, Laun.”

 

“Good night, Hyojin-hyung,” he replied softly, happily, and went into recharge mode straight away.

 

Hyojin-422N95O didn’t follow him immediately, instead staying fully conscious and listening to the small sounds of the boys dropping off to sleep one by one, as well as the very faint whirring of Laun’s systems. The boys had lined up their sleeping mats side by side and were sleeping like a line of linked transport carts on a track.

 

Hyojin-422N95O wondered what it was like to be lonely.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The next day was much the same, only they didn’t find any beacons. Some of the kids were visibly disappointed, and Jaeyoung did his best to put them in a better frame of mind. They had made progress, even if it didn’t feel like it: every square kilometer they proved to be clear narrowed their search field and made it easier to continue on.

 

That night, Minkyun and Seungjun put their heads together and made some tweaks to the weather drone. As its name suggested, it had been provided for them to send up each day to give them up-to-date information on any approaching weather or other dangerous atmospheric phenomena. Their changes switched part of its sensors to scan the ground instead and send them blips whenever it detected signs of artificial construction.

 

The first thing it found, a few hours into the day’s work, was a big torn-out section of fuselage from some ancient air craft. There wasn’t any beacon, but they designated it their new outpost and set up Seungjun’s jerry-rigged washing machine as well as the ration generator to charge in the plentiful sunlight. Changyoon also thought to grab some old chairs and rickety tables from the former halfway shelter base for them to use, though he promptly claimed one as his sole property since he’d been the one to bring it. (While Jaeyoung wasn’t looking, sometime between gathering at the ration generator and departing for their search pattern, someone had written ‘Changyoon’ on the back of the chair like an old-timey director’s chair. Changyoon was delighted and no one took credit, although the neatness of the font made Jaeyoung pretty sure Laun or Hyojin was the culprit.)

 

Jaeyoung and Seungjun were doing their job as triangulation points when both of their wrist units began emitting a slow but strident beep. They looked down at the same time, and Seungjun made a surprised sound. “Already?”

 

“Already what?” Jaeyoung tapped at his unit, trying to make the warning clearer.

 

“The meteors. We knew before we even came that there was going to be a shower today, but I completely lost track of time.”

 

“We knew that?” Jaeyoung asked. “I mean, of course we knew that.”

 

Seungjun rolled his eyes. “Come on, let’s head back and meet up at our new outpost, the others will be heading there too.”

 

“If the shower would hit all of us at out different positions I’d think it would hit the outpost too,” Jaeyoung said in concern, even as he held his arm out to tune into the port-square. “Will it be safe?”

 

“The outpost is probably closer to the shower than we are right now, actually,” Seungjun said brightly. At Jaeyoung’s _what the hell?_ gestures in reply he laughed. “Oh, not close enough to be in danger. The point is not to be as far away as possible. Just to make sure we’re all in one place and no one goes jetting off in a random direction that ends up in the path of a plummeting space rock.”

 

“Oh, that’s fine then,” Jaeyoung said, hearing his voice crack just a bit in disbelief. Then they appeared at the fuselage. Hyojin’s party was already there, and the last two blinked into being as he watched.

 

Yuto came right over to Jaeyoung: Laun was clinging to his elbow, and Yuto brought him along with a (fond?) eye-roll. “Everything okay, hyung?”

 

“No problems, Yuto,” he said reassuringly, and patted his arm. Then he did the same to Laun’s shoulder for good measure: the little android looked more nervous than maybe any of them. “How about you, Laun, you doing okay?”

 

“I’m fine,” he said: his voice was a little hoarse, and he cleared his throat in another unnervingly human tic. “It’s just, one of the reasons everyone was in such a hurry to leave Earth back in the day was because of the debris. The habs could support people quite a while even if the atmosphere was ruined, but--” he mimed something big slamming into the ground.

 

“No need to worry about this one, Launnie,” Seungjun said confidently, hurrying to the mouth of the short tunnel created by the fuselage, and sweeping Hyojin up behind him in his wake. “Nothing huge. The satellites have good enough sensors to say that confidently! It will just be a bit of a show: here, won’t you come watch?”

 

Laun didn’t let go of his grip on the long-suffering Yuto’s arm. “I don’t...I mean….” Hyojin quietly stepped over and transferred his grip from Yuto to Hyojin’s elbow. “Oh!”

 

They all went to join Seungjun at the entrance.

 

“How long?” Minkyun asked. He was holding his hands out in front of him, placing one in front of the other, turning them upside-down and sideways, to give Skitter a ever-changing surface to scramble over.

 

“About a minute,” Changyoon read off of his unit.

 

The meteor shower wasn’t too long, and it wasn’t as pretty as it probably would have been at night: the fiery dots with their long tails of smoke blended in slightly with the pale blue of the cloudless sky. More impressive was the sound of their landing. As small as they were, and as far away, there was still a noticeable distant boom or thud as they hit the ground. Even after the shower was over they stayed still for a long breathless moment, since as the meteors were disappearing the blue sky was slowly starting to creep into different colors. Jaeyoung had seen plenty of sunsets, but seeing a sunset in atmosphere, in person, was something else entirely. He found that he was holding his breath as the whole sky filled with a brilliant blaze of colors, and thought the others were too. (Even Minkyun was quiet--even Seungjun!--which told him all he needed to know right there)

 

When the last shreds of color finally faded to grey night, they released a collective sigh. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Laun said. He was still holding on to Hyojin’s elbow, but it wasn’t a strangling-tight grip any more.

 

“Nothing like it back home,” Seungjun said slowly. There was a slight frown creasing his forehead and Jaeyoung thought he might know what he was thinking. It _was_ a little depressing, thinking of going back to their block after these few weeks.

 

“Can’t get hit by a meteorite back home,” Changyoon pointed out, but he sounded subdued also.

 

Jaeyoung cleared his throat and squeezed Yuto’s hand in his. “No one’s getting hit by meteorites. But we should probably get back to the main base.”

 

“Yes. Yeah, thank you, Jaeyoung.” Seungjun shook himself out of whatever blue mood he’d been sinking into, and went to grab hold of the baggage that they’d need to take with them. “Ready?”

 

“Of course,” Hyojin said. He’d never used to talk so much, Jaeyoung was sure. He must have really been taking his responsibility as chaperone seriously. “We can come back tomorrow and start again.” He hadn’t peeled Laun’s hand off his arm.

 

***

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/154914812@N05/48082071693/in/dateposted-public/)

***

_Notes:_

_Rhythm games: I was definitely thinking of[this episode of Lights On](https://youtu.be/p4DH2RGvwD0)._

 


	9. (progress)

It was well into the fourth day of searching, and they’d already found and deactivated one beacon when Changyoon’s wrist unit began chirping a slow but gradually increasing alert. He poked at it to try and get it to say more than ‘non-specific likely oncoming object’, but it didn’t. He shook it at Minkyun, who just shrugged, then opened a general comm channel. “Hey, guys, is anyone else getting an alert? It’s kind of, I don’t know, complaining like it does for meteors but I don’t remember a meteor warning.”

 

“Can you forward the alert message?” Hyojin’s clear voice came over the line, and Minkyun stepped over and helped him do so.

 

“How are you? Everything okay in your section, apart from the alert?” 

 

“We’re fine,” Changyoon assured Jaeyoung. “A little warm, but.”

 

“Speak for yourself--I’m hot,” Minkyun said, and grinned smugly at the chorus of groans across the comms. 

 

“As sad as it is to interrupt Minkyun’s witticisms,” Hyojin said as dryly as an android could, “I believe I have uncovered the explanation. We’ll rendezvous at these coordinates.” The promised coordinates blinked up on the port-square, and with a mutual shrug Minkyun and Changyoon activated it.

 

They arrived at the coordinates--just a few hundred meters from their last--and waved at the others where they popped in right nearby. “Stop being mysterious, Hyojin,” Seungjun complained, “Tell us what it is!”

 

“Ohhhh,” Laun said, and they turned to look at what he was seeing: a dark smudge a few dozen meters away, too straight to be anything but artificial, stretching out to the left and right as far as the eye could see.

 

“Is it a river?” Jaeyoung asked. Yuto shrugged and started to walk towards it, only to be stopped by Laun’s hand on his arm.

 

“Wait, be careful! Hyung, do you think--?”

 

Hyojin’s eyes unfocused for a second before he pointed confidently to where the dark streak vanished into the right-hand horizon. “Just a few seconds, I pulled the readings from the weather drone.” Seungjun sidled up beside him and prodded at his side in punishment for not instantly telling them what they were looking for. Hyojin, expressionless, poked him back harder.

 

“That hurts,” Seungjun whined, but his face was bright as he rubbed at his side in protest. 

 

“My mistake, ” Hyojin said.

 

Changyoon started to see something where they all were looking. It looked almost like one of the heat-mirages they’d been contending with over the desert floor all day, but then it started to get darker and more distinct.

 

“It rumbles,” Laun informed them earnestly: a moment later Changyoon could hear the rumble as well.

 

“Ahh!” Seungjun said. 

 

“I don’t get it,” Minkyun whined. Changyoon agreed with him but heroically refrained from whining too. Instead he went to Laun and coaxingly folded his arms around his shoulders.

 

“What? What is it, Launnie?”

 

“Oh!” Laun crumpled like a cheap deck of cards. “It’s a train, hyung.”

 

“A train?” most of them said in a ragged chorus, and whipped their heads around to peer at the smudge that was bigger and bigger and darker and darker. 

 

“Oh. Tracks,” Yuto said, pointing at the long streak Jaeyoung had guessed was a river. “Like for cargo carts.”

 

“I didn’t realize that there--” Seungjun cut himself off as the smudge started to resolve to a visibly solid mechanical beast. And not just one--a long string of carts, the tail of which was still smudged on the horizon. Changyoon let one arm fall to his side but kept the other one around Laun’s shoulder.

 

They were all silent, as the train got louder and louder. They were still dozens of meters from where it would pass, but Changyoon found himself leaning away like an extra twenty centimeters would be any safer. Finally it was right in front of them: and gone just as fast. The clanking burden of carts behind it continued on for several long noisy minutes, as Minkyun and Yuto counted carts.

 

Finally the last car was past them, and the whole thing was rattling off into the left-hand horizon.

 

“...are there Revisionists living near here?” Jaeyoung asked.

 

“I don’t...oh, who would be using it?” Seungjun made a face. “Didn’t you see the rust on that thing? It was probably as old as...as old as….”

 

“Me?” Laun said.

 

“I wasn’t going to say it,” Seungjun lied primly. 

 

“How is it still going?” Changyoon marveled.

 

“Built fully automated, meant to go from outpost to outpost with no need for humans to mind its travels in-between,” Hyojin said. 

 

“The old stuff can be the toughest, sometimes,” Minkyun said, tapping Skitter’s patched metal carapace. “It’s not that they don’t make ‘em like they used to...but they kind of don’t.”

 

“More like it’s pointless to build something to withstand hard wear you don’t think it’s gonna receive,” Seungjun said. He shoved his hands in his pockets, smiling. “That was cool, though. Don’t you think? It’s good we know the proximity alerts can see them coming, but it’s nice to see some life on Old Dirt yet. I almost wish we had more time here to explore.”

 

“There’s plenty of life on Old Dirt,” Changyoon said, placing his hands under his chin in a flower pose. “Some of which will definitely give Minkyun rabies.”

 

Seungjun, Hyojin, and Jaeyoung all zeroed in on Minkyun’s guilty face. Seungjun looked stern, Hyojin exasperated, and Jaeyoung resigned.

 

“I didn’t touch anything,” Minkyun said before they could start to scold him, voice shrill. “Really! Changyoon, tell them!”

 

“You’re welcome,” Changyoon told them, and stepped away from Laun to grab Minkyun’s wrist and sync its device to his port-square. “Back to work?”

 

“I will find some kind of duty this evening, your punishment for trying to get bitten by local wildlife.” Seungjun wagged his finger at Minkyun. “Look forward to it.”

 

“Yay!” Minkyun said. Then they were back to work.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Jaeyoung and Minkyun came up with serious faces to where Seungjun was sitting in comfortable company with Laun during the meal break.

 

“Hey. We need a judge.”

 

Seungjun  flicked off whatever he’d been viewing on his wrist unit. “Sure. What am I judging?”. Minkyun leaned forward until their faces were bare centimeters apart, and Seungjun pulled back with a look of cross-eyed distaste. “If it’s a _smell_ I’m supposed to judge I retract my agreement. I don’t love you that much.”

 

“You love us loads, don’t lie,” Minkyun said smugly. He tried to lean in again and got stiff-armed back. 

 

“ _I_ love you!” Laun said sincerely, and got an unusually non-teasing smile from Minkyun in response. Which was good, because if he’d rejected the little android Jaeyoung would have been obligated to put him in a headlock.

 

“Not smell,” Jaeyoung said, dragging Minkyun back to a more polite distance and angling side-wards to the two of them were cheek-to-cheek. “Don’t you think I’ve gotten tanner than Minkyunnie?”

 

“Is the UV-block not working?” Seungjun asked with a sudden look of worry. Hating that unhappy forehead crease that had become more common as their trip went on, Jaeyoung hurried to reassure him.

 

“No, it’s fine, Hyojin checked it for us. But, you know, it cuts the UV down to a safe level but it doesn’t completely block it out. The droids of course wouldn’t see any change, and I guess the other three of you don’t tan easily. But really, don’t you think?”

 

“Are you _excited_ at the prospect of having star damage?” Seungjun said with an eye-roll, even as he obligingly leaned in and compared their pressed-together cheeks. “It looks just about the same to me.”

 

“Told you,” Minkyun said.

 

“Humans can change color?” Laun hesitantly put in, and they all looked at him. He kicked his feet in the air where they dangled off the edge of the chair, looking sheepish. “Sorry. I don’t have a lot of biological information. Humans didn’t change color in my time.”

 

“Humans never went outside in your time,” Hyojin said. Jaeyoung didn’t know when he had drifted over but wasn’t surprised, because the android was usually at Laun’s or Seungjun’s elbow. “Human skin produces increased levels of melanin as a protective response to UV exposure.”

 

“Oh, I see, hyung.” Laun beamed at them. “That’s fun, then! Humans can change color the same as we can.”

 

“Not exactly the same,” Hyojin said, at the same time as Minkyun said, “Androids can change color?”

 

“Sure,” Hyojin said. He tilted his head to the side and the bar-code on his neck disappeared so his whole throat was pale and unmarked. 

 

“It’s easy,” Laun said brightly. His hair, as he spoke, flushed with color from roots to tips, and in just a moment it was a bright peachy pink.

 

“Oh, that’s adorable, Launnie!” Seungjun said, and gently patted the newly-pink mop with his fingertips. “It suits you!”

 

“You think so?” Laun preened under the praise, and turned to look at Hyojin with his big eyes lit up. “Hyung!”

 

“Fine, fine,” Hyojin said. Maybe he was trying to imitate Seungjun’s ‘I’m gonna help but you should know that it’s hard so you properly appreciate my efforts’ tone, but he just sounded indulgent. He shook his head, and his hair paled from red to pink.

 

“Not bad,” Jaeyoung told him with a thumbs-up.

 

“Don’t we look alike?” Laun said, and hopped off the chair to stand beside the other android. “We look like brothers, a little, don’t we?”

 

“The only ones who look like brothers in this pack are me and Yuto,” Minkyun proclaimed, and went off--maybe to get Yuto to corroborate his statement. 

 

“You do,” Seungjun said to Laun. 

 

Laun beamed, and Hyojin almost seemed to smile back.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

They marked their 5th day of searching with finding the 6th, 7th, and 8th beacon. Seungjun declared that it was cause for celebration, and revealed not just his upgraded clothes manufacturer, but a whole suite of new menu options in the ration generator. 

 

(“How did you--?” “If they didn’t want us to use those options, they should have REMOVED them, not just locked them.”)

 

Everyone crowded around the ration generator to put their choices in and let it work on detail mode, and Seungjun watched them with a deeply satisfied feeling. When it came to clothes they were a little less eager--the only one of the group who had any strong feelings about fashion was Changyoon, and the others mostly let him choose. Except Hyojin and Jaeyoung, who specifically insisted on simple things in solid colors; and Minkyun, who declared loudly that he didn’t trust the other to dress him in something that wasn’t embarrassing. “I know how to pick clothes,” Changyoon said, clearly offended. “See if I lend you my expertise now!”

 

“I like blue,” Seungjun told him, and held his arms out in a body-building pose. “I’m definitely the best body in the group, so dress me well.”

 

Jaeyoung coughed delicately, looking at the ceiling. “Wow. Best body.” Seungjun tackled him around the waist, and knew full well that the other boy only went down to humor him. They wrestled for a bit, increasingly breathless and giggly, until Minkyun ‘sneakily’ stuck his foot in and they teamed up to drag him under. They only stopped the free-for-all when Changyoon dropped a pile of new clothes on top, the freshly-manufactured cloth smelling faintly of ozone.

 

“Can I have pink, hyung?” Laun’s sweet mellow little voice was asking as Seungjun struggled to sit up and put himself to order. Yuto was shaking out an oversized shirt in multiple pastel colors, skeptically, and Hyojin was standing a little back and watching them. He cocked his head slightly and met Seungjun’s eyes. Seungjun was jolted by a sudden, inexplicable sensation like they were meeting for the first time--or maybe it was just the first time after all the times they’d looked at each other over the years that it seemed like they were communicating without words. The corner of Hyojin’s mouth lifted ever-so-slightly, and he turned back to help Yuto where he’d put his arms through the wrong whole of his odd new shirt and gotten half-stuck.

 

Seungjun sorted out his new, blue, clothes from the others and told himself he was just seeing things. Hyojin’s new pink hair did make him look awfully different and young.

 

After everyone had changed into their new clothes, there was a period where they were admiring each other’s new looks--or jeering at them, as the case might be. They filled the hour or so til the meal was ready with several games, sitting in a circle on the imperfectly-swept ground and getting their new clothes dusty. Everyone mutually decided that they had to find games that would be fair for the androids to play too, and when Hyojin started to say that they didn’t need to go to the trouble to include him Seungjun was at the head of the wave of voices shouting him down. Hyojin didn’t protest any more after that.

 

At dinner time, not everything they’d selected ended up actually being a hit--especially something Yuto had picked because it looked interesting, that ended up being the kind of food generously described as ‘an acquired taste’

 

“You can eat it _all_ ,” Changyoon said, insincerely cheerful, and piled smelly fish-relative on the youngest’s plate. 

 

“Eat a lot and grow big and _tall_!” Minkyun added, heaping his own rejected serving as well. Yuto looked like he wanted to be offended, but Minkyun made such an ugly face as he said it that instead he just laughed, and Seungjun hid a smile in his hand to see how the older boys teasing him brightened under the success of that glowing smile.

 

“This must be what a mom feels like,” Jaeyoung said lowly beside him. “Watching her kids eat. It almost makes you full just to watch, doesn’t it?”

 

“If you’re full--” Seungjun started, and Jaeyoung snatched his plate away and hunched over it defensively. “Ha! No, but, yes. It does.”

 

Everyone was a little hyped-up that night--some of the selections had maybe had more sugar than was nutritionally necessary--and took a good while to fall asleep. Seungjun, thriving on the energy and good humor, found himself almost more energized than sleepy. The others dropped off to sleep one-by-one, even Laun going into shut-down mode, and in a trice it was just he and Hyojin.

 

“They’re doing great, don’t you think?” Seungjun asked. He was a little worried, despite everyone’s high spirits--how could he not be? He was in charge: anything could happen, and he would be at fault if it did. He never liked to let that worry show to the others, who needed him bright and cheery, full of ideas and energy; but he could be himself with Hyojin. “They’re still a little tense, but that’s almost good, don’t you think? If they relax too much it could become dangerous.”

 

“Hm. I see what you mean. When all is said and done, it is an inherently uncontrollable environment.”

 

“Right! And I know we have to be apart, for the triangulation, but still…. If someone, I don’t know, fell in a ravine, how would we even know?”

 

“The bio-metric sensors on their wrist-units would log it,” Hyojin said. His brow furrowed. “I don’t know if it would automatically broadcast an alert, though. We can do that.”

 

“Good idea!” Seungjun scrubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. They were scratchy-tired. “We can go ahead and--”

 

“--do it in the morning,” Hyojin interrupted, and Seungjun blinked at him stupidly. The corner of the android’s mouth did that little upward-twitch again, and he reached out to Seungjun and pinched his ear between his thumb and forefinger. “You need to sleep too, sparky.”

 

“Hey!” Seungjun squirmed back and rubbed his pinched ear. Part of him was enjoying the banter, but the rest of him was growing more and more confused. “Hyojin, are you...does….” he trailed off and Hyojin waited for him to re-gather his thoughts, as patient and unruffled as ever. It almost made his courage fail, but he ignored the feeling and scratched at his neck. “Do you feel...different. At all? It just seems like you maybe, ah….”

 

Hyojin sat down beside him and looked at him out of the corner of his eyes. “I haven’t been damaged. And your illicit programming additions still seem stable.”

 

“Oh, right. Good.” Seungjun still felt a little guilty about those illicit changes sometimes, no less now that he knew just how human androids could be. He started to wonder if what he’d done had been akin to back-alley doctoring, that maybe he’d stuck his friend with sub-standard modifications that might overall cause more harm than good. “Oh, god, I was a _kid_ when I did those...are you sure they’re holding up? I could, I don’t know, I could always, maybe remove them? Or alter them, however you like? I know you just did them to placate me, since I, you know. Had no friends.”

 

Hyojin’s hand hovered for a second before landing on Seungjun’s where it was draped over his knee. “I don’t….” he paused, and delicately hooked two of his fingers over Seungjun’s. “I really am fine. The modifications don’t always behave as expected, but I’ve never been at risk in any way. They are...hmm. A gift.”

 

Seungjun’s head snapped up and he stared at the android in shock--Hyojin, in turn, met his eyes sideways, and then square-on. 

 

“You gave me the ability to choose. And I’ve found that I like making choices.” His gaze dropped, like a human trying to gather his courage, and inhaled a slow nearly-useless breath. “I, I think….”

 

 _You don’t have to tell me_ , Seungjun tried to say, but what came out was, “What?”

 

Hyojin pulled away and folded his hands primly in his lap. “I asked Laun to upload...to share his programming.”

 

“Oh?” Seungjun thought about it for a bare second, and his eyes flew wide open. “Oh!”

 

“Yes.” Hyojin pulled his knees up, mirroring Seungjun’s pose, and stared intently at his fingernails. “I knew I wanted it, so I did. It’s all very different. There’s fail-safes, of course, so I’ve never been unable to function, but they can be overwhelming sometimes.”

 

“They. The emotions.” Hyojin nodded, and Seungjun bit at the side of his thumb, torn. He felt like _he’d_ just had a download of emotions, and he tried to sort them out as logically as Hyojin probably did. He was intrigued, and wanted professionally to peek into the code: he was delighted, that Hyojin could feel things: nervous, because what if Hyojin discovered that he didn’t actually like him very much: hurt, because he’d had this for days and not told him anything. “Why didn’t you say?” He decided to ask, since that could answer several questions at once. 

 

Hyojin shook his head and looked at him with a line between his eyebrows. “I don’t know. Laun said I should, but I was…” he stopped, and there was the look of internal calculation that Seungjun had seen a thousand times. “...I was frightened.”

 

He felt his guard drop all at once. “You were scared?” Hyojin nodded. “Of me?” Nod. “ _Why_?”

 

“Things are different. _I’m_ different.” The worry line got deeper, and he frowned at his hands. “There are a nearly incalculable amount of problems this could cause when we return to our normal situation. For me, and for all of you.”

 

“We already figured there’s no _law_ against emotions,” Seungjun said. “Why would, I mean, why would it cause problems?”

 

Hyojin shrugged. “As I said: too many factors to easily calculate. But apart from the legality. You’ve always called me your friend, and I’ve never been like this.”

 

“You think you're not my friend any more?” Seungjun said, and heard his own voice squeak up incredulously. “Wait. Do you not like me now that you can like things?”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” Hyojin said severely, and even though it was harsh Seungjun was startled enough to laugh. When he laughed Hyojin smiled, and it wasn’t very big or impressive, but now that Seungjun knew what he was looking for it was unquestionably a smile. 

 

“Sorry.”

 

“Good. I like you a lot. You’re my first friend.”

 

“Wouldn’t Laun be your first friend?” Seungjun asked, trying hard not to be jealous, since a person could after all have multiple friends and he didn’t want to be stupid. “Since he was there when you first had emotions?”

 

“You were my friend first,” Hyojin said, and scooted over to bump against Seungjun’s side. “It counts. We’ve been friends for years, I just had a really different brain from you then.”

 

“Well!” Seungjun bumped back, incredibly pleased. “If you don’t not like me--” Hyojin cringed at the grammar and he bobbed his eyebrows mockingly, “--that’s what you said, it’s not that you don’t like me. What, do you think that I won’t like _you_?”

 

“I’m different,” Hyojin said plainly, plaintively.

 

“ _I’m_ different from who I was 10 years ago too,” Seungjun said, cheerfulness fully restored, and held out his hand to the android. “Let’s start chapter two then! My name’s Lee Seungjun, and I think that we’re going to be best friends.”

 

Maybe it was just getting better with practice, but Hyojin’s smile this time was hardly awkward at all, and he returned the handshake firmly. “My ID is Hyojin-422N95O, but I think just ‘Hyojin’ is good.”

 

***

* * *

 

***

_Notes:_

_star damage:[it makes you attractive!](https://nathanwpyle.threadless.com/designs/strange-planet-i-crave-star-damage) _

_pink hair: Laun only had pink hair for one brief shining moment pre-debut and we all deserve more._

_clothing choice: only[E-tion](https://on7off.tumblr.com/post/186040104064) has any real interest in fashion that I can tell, and who even knows if anything we see an ONF in is something they chose or something a stylist dressed them in? We'll just assume the weird assortment from the MVs is a mix of space fashion, retro space fashion, and I-don't-give-a-shit-is-it-comfy?. _

_boy that was resolved quickly: our two leaders are best friends 4lyfe, and I would never sow discord among them even in fiction. Hyo-J forever!_

__


	10. (fly me to the moon)

 

The days passed mostly interchangeably. They went out, and ported around, and found beacons here and there to shut down. Every day or so they would switch around the pairings, although Hyojin always insisted on being in the same group as human maknae Yuto: some were more effective than others, but Seungjun was grateful that everyone got along, no matter how they were paired. Sooner than he would have thought possible, they had been working for nearly two weeks and were down to only a scant handful of scattered signals to find. They were venturing further and further away from the starting point of Laun’s base, and though the signals were fewer that actually made it a bit easier to pinpoint them. Seungjun had already started feeling a slow gut-level buzz of apprehension at knowing that they were reaching the end of their mission and he hadn’t a clue of what to do next. 

 

Today, they had done a chain of a dozen jumps before even starting their search pattern. They were far from ‘home’, and he found himself watching the environment around them with fresh alertness. A few hours into the search Changyoon sat down under an overhang of rock and refused to move on til they’d had a rest and a snack. Seungjun didn’t object, except to tease him, and commed the others to let them know it was officially break time already. He didn’t feel like eating his own snack, so instead he scrambled to the top of the cluster of boulders Changyoon was sheltering beside.

 

“Don’t break something. I’m not carrying you back!” Changyoon called up to him, and Seungjun rolled his eyes hard even though the other couldn’t see him. 

 

“Worry about yourself,” he said. He did step carefully though. Their youngest had turned his ankle yesterday and was currently walking with a limp, although he gently brushed off Laun’s worried hovering with assurances that travelling by port-square meant that he didn’t have to do enough walking to bother him. The top of the little hummock was fairly flat, beaten smooth by years of wind and periodic violent storms. He stood on top and squinted until the lenses in his eyes adjusted to bring the brightness of the world down around him a little. He turned a slow, slow 360. There wasn’t a lot to see: as far as they’d ranged out, the desert was still a desert and didn’t have much change in appearance. 

 

At one point on the horizon, though, there was a...something. A definitely _large_ something, though it first looked like nothing more than a mirage, dark and distinctly different from the other points of the horizon. “Huh,” he said, and sat down on the rock to pull up his wrist display. He paged through files--he’d added too much random crap while they were here, he’d have to take an evening soon and organize everything neatly--until he found several of the maps that they’d pulled from Laun’s base way back at the beginning of this trip. It was hard to interpret them, since they used different conventions than modern maps: but he found what he was looking for and crowed in triumph. He opened a channel on his comm and waited for the clicks that indicated connection with each of the others. “Kids, we’ve got a city on the horizon! Shall we check it out?”

 

“A city??” multiple voices said in staggered chorus. 

 

“I don’t want to have to search a whole city,” Jaeyoung said plaintively. “It’s hard enough to find these things out on the big flatness….”

 

“Cities were shut down neatly,” Laun put in diffidently. He always spoke so softly, and when he did everyone shut up to listen to him: Seungjun wished he could steal that trick, but knew himself well enough to know he’d never pull it off. “Methodical, over years. People stripped everything useful. The things we’re finding are abandoned bits here and there, from stragglers of people caught unaware in the early days. There wouldn’t be anything that could be accidentally triggered in there.”

 

“That’s a relief, then,” Seungjun said. “Aren’t you curious at all? I know I am!”

 

“I would like to see it,” Hyojin said. “It would be interesting.”

 

Seungjun wondered, yet again, how he’d been so dense as to not notice when Hyojin had gotten his emotion download. How did the _others_ not notice?

 

“I’m down,” Jaeyoung said, followed by the others one by one agreeing that it would be interesting. Seungjun slid and jumped down from the rocks, landing beside Changyoon with a thud that made the other jolt and then valiantly pretending that it hadn’t hurt.

 

“Let’s get going then, lazy.”

 

“I’m not lazy,” Changyoon protested, pinching the side of his neck in protest. Seungjun yelped, twitching away, and jabbed back. Before it could escalate further, he hit a few controls on the port-square and teleported them a kilometer closer to the city-blur. 

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Everyone arrived at slightly different times, probably. Seungjun barely noticed, too busy staring uncomfortably at the city, which looked much, much bigger and more intimidating when they were barely a kilometer out. The skyline was...patchy. Some of the buildings had perhaps been differing heights initially, but now the whole missing-tooth outline was carved out by collapsed buildings. Even where they’d landed, a raised bit of land outside the city border, was surrounded by a wide circle of cracked street-material, largely intact but crumbled around the edges and forcefully split in places by stubborn plant growth.

 

“That doesn’t look safe,” Jaeyoung said finally. He had Yuto on his back, and the maknae had his chin propped on Jaeyoung’s shoulder to stare at the city with huge eyes. 

 

“Is it just because it hadn’t been...maintained?” He asked.

 

“Partially,” Hyojin said. He had looked at the city at first but was now looking interestedly at the humans around him. Maybe he was curious why they would be so unsettled by the sight. “In addition, I would guess that the buildings were built at many different times: the newer ones, with better materials and construction techniques, would last when the older ones bowed to nature.”

 

“So it is unsafe?” Seungjun asked. Laun had reached out to lightly hold his sleeve and he shifted to hold the little android’s hand. “I know we decided there wouldn’t be any beacons there, but I think it’s be interesting to look at just because.”

 

Hyojin frowned thoughtfully. He glanced up: the weather drone, at his wireless signal, zipped for the city. “It might be fine. I wouldn’t want to be there during a storm or meteor shower, but everything that could collapse likely did so within a hundred years of being abandoned.” He blinked, at the same time Seungjun’s wrist unit beeped a signal from the drone. “Well, there’s at least one spot that seems clear. Do you want to go, Seungjun?”

 

“I’d like to,” he said. “Kids?” there was a general rustle of shrugs and nods, even though Changyoon made a stank-face along with his nod. 

 

“Androids first to test,” Hyojin said. He held out his hand and wiggled his fingers, and Laun transferred his hand from Seungjun’s to Hyojin’s with a smile. Hyojin nodded, and they both blinked out.

 

“...will we be waiting long, do you think?” Minkyun said. He was rolling a little bit of debris, something metal and clicky, between his fingers.

 

“Well, they have to stomp around a minute to make sure they don’t fall through the floor,” Changyoon said in a very reasonable voice.

 

“I’m not sure that’s exactly--” Beep went the signal. Seungjun contented himself with a strong eye-roll and went to sync his port-square to Jaeyoung and Yuto.

 

They ported out and reappeared on a wide stretch of concrete with a big open-framed structure to the left--that’s what he noticed first. Then, as Changyoon yelped out an oath, he realized that they were on the roof of a building on the city edge and the landscape spread out dizzyingly far below them.

 

“Are we sure this is safe?” Jaeyoung said in the voice of a man who thought himself the only reasonable person in the room.

 

“No less safe than the desert,” Laun said helpfully. He was craning his neck to look at the metal structure beside them: some kind of huge sign, the lettering of which was in a language Seungjun didn’t know. “You can see everything here. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Can this be our base in this zone?”

 

“We would need to find a back-up on ground level,” Hyojin said. “Something to shelter us from weather. But as long as we have that I think it will work well.”

 

“If we fall through the floor I’m using hyung to cushion my fall,” Yuto said quietly from his position on Jaeyoung’s back.

 

“Are we gonna fall?” Minkyun asked. Hyojin shook his head, Laun shrugged. Minkyun jumped up and down in place for a moment as Changyoon cringed beside him. “Seems okay!”

 

“ _Thank_ you for that.”

 

Everyone drifted over to the side of the roof that overlooked the city. It stretched out for kilometers, the buildings blurring into atmospheric haze before the end could be seen. The skyline gaps were even more striking from this angle, with some streets perfectly clear and some looking like a bomb had gone off. 

 

“It’s so big and lonely,” Laun said. “What are cities like in your t...I mean, in these days?” 

 

Everyone looked to Jaeyoung-and-Yuto, the only ones who had lived in proper cities. Both shrugged, which wasn’t easy for Jaeyoung with how he was carrying Yuto. The latter gently nudged to be let down, which Jaeyoung did before responding: “Just as big and not as lonely. Noisy--lights and sounds everywhere. Lonely in a different way, unless you’re walking with someone you know. How about on Mars?”

 

“Very clean and….” Yuto frowned. “Maybe...you’d say planned? The buildings here don’t match, but everything in those cities is--” he shaped out a square of air with his hands. “Measured. On-purpose.”

 

“That doesn’t sound bad,” Laun said brightly. Seungjun rather suspected he’d think a dungeon didn’t sound so bad if Yuto was the one describing it. “Is that where we’re going back to?” His smile faded just slightly. “Is it ‘ _we’_? I had assumed, but I don’t want to presume…”

 

“Of course!” “What, we’d leave you here?” “You know what they say about ‘assume’...” “You have to come, don’t be stupid.”

 

The barrage of simultaneous answers made Seungjun’s head spin, but Laun took them all in and beamed back. “Oh, good, that’s a relief.” He tucked his hands under his armpits and shuffled his feet. “Do you...I mean, we had talked about the government a little.”

 

Jaeyoung was looking at him with the mild, brows-up expression that Seungjun privately thought of as ‘if I’m not the leader you better start leading’. He reached out to drag Laun in under his arm and leaned against the half-wall that marked the edge of the roof. “You’re right, Launnie. I think this is long overdue.” He patted him, and looked around at the others; Minkyun had found some kind of square box thing among the bits and bobs on the rooftop and was dragging it over noisily for Yuto to sit on, so everyone waited for that racket to stop before he could speak again. “Thank you. I mean, clearly, we’re taking Laun with us. But we haven’t made a plan beyond that.”

 

“A plan to sneak him in?” Yuto asked. Seungjun nodded.

 

“Wait, wait,” Changyoon said, waving his arm in the air. “Why do we go straight to sneaking? Can’t we just say, here’s our new friend Laun, he’s an old android, finders keepers?”

 

“It’s too risky,” Hyojin said. “Laun’s programming might not be illegal in any official way, but there would surely be a lot of attention on him if we made his origins clear--as a novelty from the past if nothing else. There is no guarantee that his personality programming would stay as it was, or that he would not be claimed by a government agency and started on a standard cycle of regular memory wipes.”

 

“Wouldn’t we have to hide you, too?” Yuto asked. He was rubbing at his sore ankle slowly, but the furrow in his forehead was more worry than pain. “You’d go right back into the cycle, too.”

 

“Wait, why are we hiding Hyojin?” Changyoon asked.

 

“...because of the emotional programming from Laun?” Jaeyoung said, sounding confused.

 

Seungjun’s brain briefly blue-screened. Had Hyojin told them first and then told them to keep it secret from him? Had he told them recently and simply no one had mentioned it? Were they all just sharp enough to have figured it out on their own?

 

“Wait, his _what_??” Minkyun shouted. (okay, it was the third option, then)

 

“Keep up, hyung,” Yuto said kindly.

 

“Did everyone know this but me??”

 

“It was pretty obvious,” Jaeyoung said. Seungjun valiantly refrained from asking how long he’d known, since that was a fast track to disappointment.

 

“I have...specialized programming. I can sequester anything I want to keep and it shouldn’t be affected by a standard wipe. There is no need to ‘hide’ me.”

 

“Specialized programming?” Minkyun whispered to Changyoon, not quietly at all. “What is he, a special agent robot?”

 

“So we are agreed that we can’t just walk in the front door with Laun,” Seungjun cut in before the discussion could devolve further. “Step one: get him home with us. Already a problem, because the moon transporter already knows what we took with us and will sound an alert if something unknown is in the system.”

 

They thought about that for a minute before Laun spoke up. “Couldn’t we...I mean, I must be only a little smaller than the clothes-machine. Couldn’t you just, spoof the signal somehow to leave that behind and take me instead?”

 

“Laun, you are a genius!” He squeezed him tightly and shook him back and forth a few times. “Perfect! The tech will have signal-tags to make them easier to pick up, we can just transfer a tag to you. Step one solved! Step two: the teleporter will deliver us straight home, no side quests. Whoever greets us will clearly see that Laun is not a laundry machine.”

 

“Do we have to go straight home?” Yuto offered. “Maybe you could divert us to a station with no one watching?”

 

“Yuto, you're a genius! Jaeyoung, hug Yuto,” Seungjun ordered. He did. “That’s something we can work with. If I program it right, I can definitely use the signal from our port-squares to spoof the tech and divert us. Or only a few of us--make it look like an error. Maybe, I don’t know, me and Jaeyoung and Yuto go home as planned, and the rest of you get some kind of backwoods station in Langrenus. Oops! Looks like the three holding the port-squares are a little off-track! No big deal, they will comm in and the staff will pick them up.”

 

“And we just...leave Laun in the city?”

 

Seungjun frowned at Changyoon’s question. Under his arm, Laun sighed. “It’s ok, hyung, I can be alone. Maybe you work out a way to comm me….”

 

“Just because you’re not among us doesn’t mean you have to be alone,” Jaeyoung protested strongly. “You’ll just pretend to be an entailment droid in Langrenus. Turn your hair back brown and show a barcode and you’ll look like any other Minseok. You’ll fit in wherever, I’m sure. Make plenty of friends.”

 

“And I can definitely communicate with you,” Seungjun said. “We’re less than a year away from independence--after than we can go anywhere we want, together!” 

 

“Even Hyojin?” Laun asked softly.

 

“I’ll figure out something,” Seungjun assured him breezily. “There are inventory and database errors all the time, we can ‘disappear’ him with no problem, I’d just need a little time.”

 

“If we can go anywhere can we visit settlements here before we go to Mars?” Minkyun said abruptly. “I really want to meet Revisionists.”

 

“That would be cool,” Seungjun agreed.

 

“I don’t know if I’d want to live here, but Earth is definitely much more interesting than I would have thought,” Minkyun continued. “Probably especially in places not as dry and dusty as this. I want to see a forest!”

 

“Once we graduate, I don’t see why not,” Jaeyoung said. “Would you want to go straight to Mars, Yuto, or visit here more?”

 

“I don’t know.” Yuto shrugged. “I think either would be fine. As long as we don’t have to split up.”

 

“They’d have to drag me off kicking and screaming,” Seungjun proclaimed, and stood up, clapping his hands together. “Okay! It’s a plan! I’ll start on the programming right away.”

 

“We can continue the search pattern without you,” Hyojin said. “That should give you enough time. As I calculate it, we have about 5 days until we finish with the last beacon.”

 

“Five days?” Seungjun cracked his knuckled. “Piece of cake. We’ll be in business before you even have time to think about it. Then next stop--the moon!”


	11. (best laid plans)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WML is giving me a lot of grief trying to make everything work together, but I thought I'd give y'all this much at least! As always, any comments you are willing to give are gratefully devoured <3

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/154914812@N05/48508280917/in/dateposted-public/)

* * *

 

***

 

The transport room appeared around him, and Yuto swayed and almost fell. The representative was in front of the platform, wearing a welcoming smile that dropped into confusion as he noticed that the group was missing members. “Yuto! What happened?”

 

Yuto shook his head, feeling weirdly dizzy. Whatever Seungjun had done to fool the transporter, it had made that ride rough. He figured he should turn to Seungjun and pretend to be confused also, but he had drilled it into his brain before they transported that it was back to calling none of them ‘hyung’, and so his brain briefly misfired trying to say two different things, then his Korean deserted him and he just shrugged at the representative with what he hoped was more of a confused expression than a guilty one. 

 

The representative hurried up the platform and gently supported him under his elbows. “What happened? Where are the others?”

 

Yuto waited for Seungjun answer: Seungjun always had an answer. But there was no response. He blinked hard, and turned in the representative’s grasp to look behind him on the platform.

 

The empty platform.

 

“I don’t understand,” he said numbly. At least he didn’t have to pretend to be confused. 

 

“Why would the transporter have taken only you?” The representative helped him down from the platform. Most of the dizziness had faded, but his ankle was still a little sore so Yuto accepted the help in a swirl of utter bafflement. 

 

“We were coming back together,” he said, and tried not let it show as he realized-- _ah,_ everyone but him had somehow gone to the diversion point in Langrenus! Any minute now they would comm in to explain the ‘mistake’ to the staff. But still, he couldn’t give any sign that he knew. “Could it have malfunctioned somehow? Like, sent them somewhere else?”

 

“Maybe...maybe, let’s, let’s go see the tech on duty.” He patted Yuto’s shoulder carefully: staff weren’t forbidden from touching their charges, but there were strict regulations in place. “I’m glad you’re safe at least, Yuto.”

 

He felt a pang of remorse. The poor representative was so worried! But it was for a good cause, he reassured himself. Laun was safe and that was more important than a minute of worry for the representative...and for him. 

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The room was dark, and the platform was uneven, and if Seungjun had any further doubts that something had gone wrong they would have been settled by Jaeyoung swearing fiercely behind him. 

 

“It went backwards!” He said, hearing his voice echo shrilly and squeezing at his temples where a headache had sprung into being full-formed. “Dammit. How are we supposed to salvage this? They’ll see--”

 

“Yuto isn’t here,” Jaeyoung interrupted him.

 

“He’s _what_ ,” Seungjun said, spinning in place and nearly toppling over as he did so. He and Jaeyoung were the only ones in the room. “What...that doesn’t make sense. If something went wrong, it should have been...one for the others. If the three with port-squares aren’t here....” He squeezed his head again and stifled a cry of frustration. “It doesn’t make sense!” He shoved his cuff back off his wrist unit and keyed in a few frustrated strokes. “Hyojin, are you there? What happened?”

 

“It didn’t even click,” Jaeyoung said, deeper and more worried than ever. He pulled Seungjun with him to the wall, which was a good idea since in theory anyone could teleport in while they were flailing about. 

 

Seungjun swore, and tried Changyoon next. That call didn’t ‘click’ either--anyone who knew what they were listening for could tell when a call had made a connection with another comm, even if the other person didn’t actually pick up. The only reason that it wouldn’t even ping…. “They aren’t even on the _moon_ ,” he said, increasingly frantic. “If I screwed up that badly...even...it doesn’t….”

 

Jaeyoung tapped at his own unit, and this time they both heard the ‘click’ of an available line. He didn’t actually complete a call though, and instead actually turned off his unit completely. “Yuto is here somewhere. But if he’s back home calling him will give the game away. We need to figure this out.”

 

“We...yes. Yes, of course.” Seungjun switched his own unit off also, even though it would be a lot harder to trace his than Jaeyoung’s. “We can still salvage this.”

 

“What do you want to do?”

 

Seungjun leaned against Jaeyoung briefly, relieved beyond expressing to have that steady support at his back even if everything else had fallen apart. “I need to get somewhere with a good computer-link and start investigating. I can get into WM-block’s main system easy, I left myself plenty of backdoors, maybe if I can get through to a bigger sensor- or comm-suite….”

 

“No problem,” Jaeyoung said. “We’ll have everyone back together before you can say ‘please’.”

  


***

* * *

 

***

 

Minkyun waited for the world to stop sloshing around him before opening his eyes. For a brief confused moment, Langrenus was both far bigger and far more run-down than he had expected, before he registered the evening sky way, way above his head and realized that he was still on Earth. More than that--very far from where he had been, since when they’d teleported out the sky outside was bright morning sun. “ _Ahhh!_ ” he shouted, and cringed to hear it barely echo in the space around him. It was outside somewhere, trees on most sides and old masonry on another. No answer came except for the diffuse echo. “Where are you!” he shouted again.

 

To no response.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Changyoon wobbled and plonked down right on his butt, staring at his hand accusingly. Laun had been holding that hand just a second ago--a microsecond, Hyojin would probably say, yes, okay, the technology didn’t work like--anyway! Laun wasn’t holding his hand, which was a problem. “Did I black out?” He said.

 

No one answered, which was weird, because Seungjun was with the other group but Minkyun could always be relied upon to make a response.

 

He tore his gaze away from his hand and looked up. No one was around him, as they should have been. What _was_ around him was a long tunnel of some kind of cement, which he could see being in the moon city, but it was rather old and crumbly and there was spray-painted graffiti on every surface.

 

“...I don’t think this is Langrenus,” he said astutely.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Hyojin blinked into existence and assessed the environment around him as it was still forming, which was why he knew right away that things had gone terribly wrong. They hadn’t left Earth, that much was clear. He was in come kind of open-air arena, and none of the others were around him. The port-square on his arm ticked out a hash of garbage signals briefly before going dormant.

 

“I don’t like this,” Hyojin said. Of course no one was there to hear it, but saying it made him feel relieved in a weird way. He tried to comm the others, in rapid succession that a human couldn’t have managed: he got only two clicks back. 

 

After the moment of connection, two shrill voices came through, piling on top of each other in a way that a non-android would have found completely indistinguishable.

 

“--what happened--” “--it’s like some kind of old temple or som--” “--Laun isn’t here, who--” “--does Seungjun--”

 

“It’s only Hyojin, Minkyun, and Changyoon here,” Hyojin said crisply. The others trailed off. “We are far away from our starting point: it’s possible the others didn’t leave at all, and are merely out of range of our personal transmitters. Or they could have made it to the Moon as planned and something could have gone wrong on our side. Or something disastrous could have happened, and they could be injured or discorperated.”

 

“What should we do?” Changyoon said. An android without Hyojin’s specialized programming might have missed the fear in his voice. 

 

“Each of you, drop this connection and try to contact each of the others.”

 

They did, and Hyojin dropped to sit on one of the stone tiers of the arena seating. It had probably been beautiful once, this place.

 

“Nothing,” Changyoon reconnected to say in a moment.

 

A second later, Minkyun’s excited voice came through as well. “Yah, I got Laun! Well, I didn’t _get_ him, there was no answer, but it clicked! Does that mean the others are here too?”

 

Hyojin’s mind overclocked, trying to calculate the possible explanation. “Laun’s comm is outdated and has much shorter range than ours. If he was with the others, I could contact them as easily as I did you. So Laun must be close to Minkyun in particular, and we still have no idea where the others are.” He bit at his thumb, feeling a very human frustration. “I don’t know if we can risk the port-squares. If they truly are malfunctioning this badly then something worse could happen. Depending how far apart we are, it could take hours or days to reunite.”

 

“Hyojin,” Changyoon said. “Why wouldn’t Laun answer if Minkyun clicked him?”

 

To that, he had no answer.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

_The android knew one thing: the surface under him was lumpy and hard._

 

_His eyes cracked open slowly and took a long minute to focus. Sun: trees: shadows: silence._

 

_The android sat up carefully. He knew five things._

 

_The device on his wrist made a chirp, and a kind of light display sprung up over it, but the android didn’t know what any of it meant._

 

_There was different terrain around him. Most of it was full of the trees and the shadows, but there was a long wiggly sort of clearness on the ground. Path? Riverbed?_

 

_He didn’t much like where he was._

 

_The android knew seven things._

 

_Planting his feet on the clearness made it easier to move. Perhaps if he moved, he would find something that he liked._

 

_The android knew seven things._

 

 


	12. (of mice and men)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, this is not the note I thought I would have to write for this chapter.  
> I knew that I would have to say something about the upcoming comeback and the fact that it is almost certain to Joss my theory/storyline. ㅋㅋ I DIDN'T think I'd have to mention that Laun has abruptly left the group due to undisclosed personal issues. But he has, and he did, and here we are. ㅠㅠ  
> Within the context of this story then, I will just say, the response to both dilemmas is the same: ONF's MVs have always played with the concept of multiple universes, time travel, partings and reunions. This story will remain as it is--one potential universe. And in this universe, Laun is here. And he will still be. :)  
> Fuse fighting! ONF fighting! Kim Minseok fighting!

***

* * *

 

***

 

Minkyun was quiet, which Hyojin knew was a bad sign. Changyoon as well, although he at least could usually be silent when he wanted to. “Where are each of you?” He said. “Have your wrist unit send me coordinates.” He tried to comm Laun: no click.

 

“I’m in a creepy tunnel,” Changyoon said, as his coordinates beeped into Hyojin’s processor. “That’s all I can see.”

 

“I see trees, and old concrete things. Maybe a road or a wall or something?” Minkyun made a frustrated sound. “Are you _sure_ we can’t just port-square to a meeting point?”

 

“I have my port-square running a diagnostic, but I’d like to compare the log from it to at least one of yours in person as well to ensure there isn’t something more dangerously wrong.” Another attempt: still no click.

 

“So we need to meet-up the old-fashioned way?” Changyoon said. “I can compare your coordinates to mine but that doesn’t tell me at all what is between you and me. If we just started walking towards each other we could hit a gaping chasm in-between, or something.”

 

“A good point well-made,” Hyojin said. He stood up and looked around him as far as he could see: there were buildings not far from the edge of the sunken auditorium where he was, and he nodded to himself and started towards them, even as he compulsively tried to comm again. “Let’s all try and find something near us that shows remnants of civilization. Hopefully we can find both maps and roads and figure out how to connect to each other.”

 

“Sure!” Minkyun said immediately. “I’ll follow this old road until I find some buildings or something.”

 

“I can follow my tunnel, I guess,” Changyoon said reluctantly.

 

“Good,” Hyojin said approvingly. “Stay in touch.”

 

He tried to call Laun again. To no response.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

 

When the others hadn’t commed after ten minutes, Yuto started to really truly worry. After twenty he was as worried as the poor representative.

 

After an hour, when no one had called in and none of the staff had located any of the others, he was as panicked as he’d ever been in his not-so-long life. More so than the representative--who was sure they were at another station or perhaps merely left behind on the planet surface--because _he_ was well aware that if something had gone wrong with their plan things could have gone _fatally_ wrong. He remembered being 12 years old, his arms barely able to contain the half-dozen stuffed animals in them, watering those plushies generously with his tears and stepping into an interplanetary transport _absolutely convinced_ that it was going to disperse his atoms across the universe. He didn’t understand the workings of the teleporter as well as Seungjun or Hyojin did, but he was fairly sure that it was at least possible.

 

He had been released by the representative, who was full of kind sympathy for his visible fright, to check in at the medbay before returning to his quarters. The checkup was quick, except for a few minutes extra to find a brace to fit his still-twinging ankle, and he went for his room with more than the twisted ankle causing his feet to drag. His feet dragged so much, actually, that he very nearly tripped over something that gave a shocked electronic squeal.

 

“Sorry! I’m sorry!” he said, in a weird mish-mash of Japanese and Korean. It was a mouse bot that he’d nearly stepped on, one of the the low-slung little rollers that carried small parcels and secure communications. It whirred in a little circle, then gave him its programmed ‘friendly’ chirp and resumed its determined way. “Ohhh, wait,” he said softly to himself, and adjusted his course slightly. His unit’s personal chambers were split between three different corridors. Instead of the one that would lead to his and Seungjun’s rooms he went down the adjacent hallway. Jaeyoung’s room was first, and when he came this way that’s usually where he was going, but today he continued on until he reached the end. There was the door to Minkyun’s room, and outside the door there was a very old, very scrap-worked mouse bot. 

 

“Are you waiting for Minkyun hyung?” He asked it sympathetically. It turned at the sound of his voice and gave a ‘help me?/question?/I’m lost?’ sound. It’s vocoder was very clear, definitely an upgrade from the one it had been manufactured with. “I’m sorry, little guy. He’s not here. Do you need help?” The mouse bots, like most of the little helper bots , weren’t truly sentient. They had a rudimentary AI, but any higher functions had to be outsourced to the mainframe. He crouched down and gently lifted it up (It gave a little ‘woo!’ sound as he turned it over) and inspected its undercarriage, trying to think like Minkyun hyung. “What could you need help with?” He asked. It was clearly powered: there didn’t seem to be any damage: there wasn’t even anything clogging up its tiny treads. “Can you not get in the tubes?”

 

He put it down just as gently--to the sound of another tinny ‘woooooah!’--and shuffled over on his knees to the bot egress just a meter away, one of thousands such that allowed the little bots to travel between walls. He thumbed it open and then started back with a bitten-off curse as multiple LED eyes looked at him. “Poor little guys,” he said: there were five or six bots, of various form and function, just hanging out in the egress which they normally used purely to get from point A to point B. “You’re all missing Minkyun-hy--I mean, you’re all missing him, huh?” He stood up and closed the door, feeling that it was only polite. “Let me know if you need anything,” he said. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

 

The mouse bot near Minkyun’s door stayed in it’s place, ticking quietly to itself.

 

“We’ll get him back,” Yuto said, having no idea how. He sighed a sigh straight up from his toes. “I wish the others were here.”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

They were in a _really_ nice hotel room. The private, quiet, tricked-out kind mostly used by possibly-shady businesspeople who wanted to not be disturbed. 

 

“Are we breaking and entering?” Jaeyoung couldn’t help but ask.

 

“Of course not!” Seungjun said indignantly. He was already at the workstation that slid out of the wall and put a ready cursor on the big display screen. “I have money, from, mm, _jobs_ and such. I rented it fair and square. It shouldn’t be easy to trace either.”

 

“Money from illegal activities?” Jaeyoung said, resigned. Seungjun replied with a wobbly hand gesture and doubtful sound that Jaeyoung interpreted as ‘plausible deniability is your friend’. “Well, alright.”

 

Seungjun cracked his knuckles ceremoniously, one-by-one, then started manipulating the controls with a deft confidence that Jaeyoung couldn’t help but admire. “I’ll start by slipping in a message for Yuto. Just something so he won’t worry.”

 

“ _Good_ ,” he said strongly. He had been fretting about their youngest’s possible fear at being essentially abandoned. “Tell him I say hi.”

 

“No,” Seungjun said primly, even as his fingers typed it out.

 

“Fine.” Jaeyoung flopped down on the bed, more exhausted by this whole mess than he would be after an hour of hardcore exercise. “What am I supposed to do in the meantime? I’m no good at hacking.”

 

“No, you’re awful at hacking,” Seungjun agreed, dodging Jaeyoung’s pinch that he had to know was coming. “You’re too honest for it.” He changed whatever he was doing, and a new slate of information sprang up on the screen. The screen was over the bed, and Jaeyoung craned his neck backwards to see it. “How do you feel about being the feet on the street?”

 

“Which street?” he said, interested and spinning around to get a better angle on the screen.

 

“Pick one. Everything I got pulled up would have what we need.” He highlighted a line. “However we fix this, Laun is gonna need stuff to keep his running, especially since he can’t hold a charge and so on like a modern droid. I figured we’d have to do this more remotely, but while I’m working you can go out and get a bunch of the things that make it easier for an android to keep running.”

 

“'Keep ru'--oh!” Jaeyoung squinted at the lines of text. “Like portable chargers and stuff.”

 

“Spare parts, toolkits, upgrade kits. This is a perfect opportunity, and having you actually here so I don’t have to just do it through a parcel service--” Seungjun gave him a thumbs-up. “--silver lining?”

 

“I’ll call it that.” Jaeyoung jumped up, more relieved than he could say to have something more productive to do than just sitting here fretting. “Perfect! I’ll get enough for Hyojin too, just in case. You paying for this with your ill-gotten funds as well?”

 

“Ill-gotten, whatever.” Seungjun tossed him a credit chip (that he’d gotten from where??) and waved him away. “Go, do things. Leave the hard work to the big boys.”

 

“I could bench-press you,” Jaeyoung said easily, and let himself out.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The android had been walking along the clearness for some little while and now he was in a much bigger clearness: not clear totally, but clear of trees. The long grassy stuff around him had little flecks of brightness in it and he lightly touched one while he thought.

 

He knew many things now--ten or twelve or fifteen--but no matter how he thought about it, he did not know how he had come to be in this grassiness. He didn’t think it was connected the clearness among the trees: indeed, he couldn’t see trees anywhere.

 

The stuff around him was fading in and out, and the fades had wavy edges of red and blue. Somewhere at the edge of his range of hearing, there was a kind of noise that had a purpose in it, a noise from two or three different sources but all making the same overall shape of sound. He cradled another scrap of color from the grass and beamed as he realized that the sound was _talking_. Communication.

 

The android was somewhere else.

 

The android was somewhere quiet, and dark, and cool, and there was a scrap of something velvet-soft in his hand.

 

The android knew four things.

 

***


	13. (gang oft agley)

 

The road down from the stadium was spider-webbed with cracks, the old pavement forced apart by grass and other ground-covers: Hyojin’s systems automatically compensated for the uneven terrain as he jogged for his best guess of the center of the town. He could only guess that the more built-up center would be most likely to have something of use in his current mission. Partway through the dilapidated town he came to a bridge. It seemed mostly intact, but he leaned over the edge to peer down, wary of crossing if there was a safer way to go that wouldn't result in a frame-breaking fall if the bridge failed. At first he thought it was possibly a dried-up river below, before a glint of metal made the pieces snap together in his mind. (Laun still didn’t click with his call). He hopped over the low wall and scrambled down the berge to stand at the train tracks. There was plenty of low growth, but the lack of bigger plants and the fact that the rails had not been completely covered could only be explained if there was still traffic using these rails, and fairly frequently. 

 

He started to go along the track, still in the direction of the inner parts of town, and widened his communication frequencies with a feeling of chagrin. He had been so focused on trying to comm Laun (who didn’t respond to another call) that he didn’t even think to check if there were others who were in communications range. He knew generally where he was, based on the coordinates and his programmed-in general map of the Earth, but just because it didn’t coincide with a major settlement of Revisionists didn’t mean there couldn’t be anyone there. Old Earth’s position within the solar system was...ambiguous. As long as they could afford the teleport down, and they weren’t a dangerous fugitive, people were able to move to humanity’s birthplace with no real regulation. Hyojin didn’t know if the issue of citizenship for children born on the planet had ever come up, but everyone knew that there were some Revisionists who had moved decades ago who still faithfully sent in long-distance votes to every council election. 

 

The only click he got on any frequency, though, was Changyoon and Minkyun, so there probably weren’t any people in the area. 

 

He ran down the tracks at a steady clip, always conscious of his power levels but in no danger of tiring as quickly as a human would. After maybe half an hour the tracks came into a station. He had to scramble up to the platform that people had boarded the train from in ancient times, and nearly fell twice when the mortar holding the edge together crumbled in his grasp. He made it up in one piece however, and looked around the station sharply. He found the place where tickets had once been sold, and hauled himself over the half-door that separated it from the platform. 

 

“ _ Yes _ ,” he said in satisfaction: there was a map, quite a detailed one on the counter where patrons could select their destination. It didn’t list coordinates that corresponded to modern ways of reckoning, but by cross-referencing his current position with the stadium (clearly marked on the map) he was quickly able to pin down not only where he was, but the others as well. He activated his comm to give them the good news.

 

“Wait, that’s…” Changyoon said after the android had outlined where they were at. “I’ve been going in the opposite direction!”

 

“You’re at the lake?” Hyojin asked.

 

“Yes!” He sounded disgruntled. “It’s very pretty!”

Minkyun sent a raspberry across the line, and Changyoon replied with a colorful metaphor. “Kids, kids,” Hyojin said, enjoying it. It was so good that they could communicate. Poor Laun, lost somewhere alone. “This line clearly has vehicles still running a programmed loop.” He brushed debris off the ticket-booth’s control panel, and looked at the make of the machinery. “Oh, yes, this would definitely still be running.” He ran his fingers through the dust on the map, linking the ‘You Are Here’ star with a station very near Changyoon’s coordinates. “I’ll hop the train and go here, Changyoon,” he said, sending the coordinates over. “You should be able to turn around and go the opposite direction through your tunnel and find your way to that station’s coordinates. We’ll meet there.”

 

“What about me!” Minkyun said. “There isn’t a train station here. Just a lot of bridges to nowhere and a creepy giant lion statue.”

 

“You can find somewhere sheltered and bed down for the night,” Hyojin replied calmly. “Have your cable-crawler set to alert you if you need to be woken up. Once I meet up with Changyoon, I can double-check the error logs and if they show clear we can port-square straight to you.”

 

Minkyun made a whining noise, but didn’t say anything else. Changyoon cleared his throat. “Ah, Hyojin, when you said you’d ‘hop the train’....”

 

“I’ll see you there,” he said coolly, and dropped the connection.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Yuto was in his room, which was quite cozy and homey, all things considered, sitting on his bed among his stuffed animals and feeling very sorry for himself. He was mentally debating how effective it would be to kidnap one of Minkyun’s friends for company when his personal data station chimed with an incoming message. He jerked in surprise and dove for it, hoping that it was the representative giving him news--or even the others, telling him how everything was fine and they were still carrying out the plan! 

 

It wasn’t either of those things, though: it was the puzzle game he played sometimes in his spare time, telling him that there had been an update. He frowned to himself. He couldn’t recall the game ever announcing its updates to him like that before…he pulled up the program, and found that the display language had been switched to Japanese. The update notes box popped up, and he almost closed it without even looking at it before he saw his own name.

 

_ Yuto,  _

_ SJ and JY are working together to fix the program. Please stand by for further updates! _

_ {Everything will be Okay!} _

 

It was pretty poor Japanese, with some interesting spelling errors, but he could still understand the message and he melted into his chair with a relieved laugh. Of the others there was still no word, but evidently Seungjun and Jaeyoung were doing alright, at least--alright enough for Seungjun to be doing things with the computer that the staff wouldn’t be glad for. He was thankful enough to cry, but he instead sprang to his feet with renewed energy. The ‘plan’ was completely detail-less, but there was a plan and he would help any way he could. He hadn’t even unpacked his duffel from their mission: he grabbed it and dumped it out, then started thinking how to pack it with every possible necessity.

 

Whenever the hyungs and Laun needed him, he would be ready.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

After changing out of his uniform and into casual clothes--he’d actually kept his favorite of the outfits made by Seungjun’s modified machine down on Dirt--Jaeyoung set off on his mission to get the supplies, walking briskly to try and stay warm in clothes that had been more than enough on Dirt but weren’t enough to defeat the perpetual chill of the moon city.

 

It wasn’t hardly a mission, as it happened. He found a store quite quickly, walked in without more than a nod from the shopkeeper, and found everything on his list easily on the organized shelves. He stewed in chagrin, for a minute, feeling very childish to be disappointed that this wasn’t going to be any sort of cool and clandestine mission: but only for a minute, and then he had to work not to laugh at himself aloud, because even if this was going smoothly he didn’t want to be memorably weird. The bundle of stuff made him wish he’d grabbed a basket from near the door, but it was too late now. He made it to the front counter with only a slight wobble of the topmost of the five or six memory upgrade kits he’d stacked on his armful. The clerk helped unload him and began tallying the total. “Someone expecting a shortage here?”

 

Jaeyoung couldn’t think of how to answer without incriminating himself: he’d never been a good liar. He tried to sigh in a way that made him look resentful but also honest and un-suspicious.

 

“Drew the short straw in the office, huh.”

 

“Mm.” He grabbed on to the idea like an anchor line. “Lost a bet.” The clerk just nodded, loading the purchases into the fiber bags that Jaeyoung would have to pay for since he hadn’t brought his own. “Are there any entailment droids near here?”

 

The clerk paused and gave him a sideways look. “Looking to add to a collection?”

 

“No! No, no, it’s just…” he scratched at the back of his neck, genuinely sheepish, though not for reasons he wanted the clerk to guess. “I don’t live in Langrenus any more, and I was telling the guys about entailment droids….”

 

“They couldn’t believe it?” The clerk said, knowingly. 

 

“They thought I was full of it!” He replied, all indignation. “If I can find one and, I dunno, take a short video or something, I can  _ win  _ a bet.” 

 

“Fair enough.” The clerk, now apparently ready to believe him a fellow city guy dealing with the ignorance of country bumpkins, finished packing the bags and frowned as he loaded the credit chip Seungjun had sent with Jaeyoung. “Hmm. I think there’s some kinda one about a dozen blocks down? West-side, hangs around Sundial block. Some kinda building inspector or something, always poking into people’s business, but he saw a fault one time that woulda brought down half a power grid so people tolerate him.”

 

“Sure, that would work.” Jaeyoung accepted the credit chip back, gingerly, and loaded himself down with the bags. “You remember what model?”

 

“A Junmo, I think.”

 

“Thank you.” He hefted the bags, and went out. Mentally calculating the distance to Sundial block, he watched the shops around him until he came upon a sort of general store, where he bought a backpack that could hold most of his supplies and not have him crossing a kilometer of city carrying expensive bags around. He also grabbed a jacket, and was delighted to find its pockets deep enough to hold what the bag couldn’t. Newly outfitted (and grateful that Seungjun’s credit chip hadn’t given out) he continued on with lighter steps. Not heedlessly, though: the streets were crowded. He’d remembered that, of course, the crowds, but somehow it was way more intense than it had been in his memories...which made  _ no  _ sense, because he’d been a lot smaller then. He hadn’t lied to Laun: being in the crowd was more lonely than being alone would have been. 

 

(It had only been  _ hours _ , why did he miss the kids so much??)

 

He found the Junmo pretty easily once he reached Sundial block. He was on his hands and knees, peering at a building base, and people took a wide berth around him. “Hello?” Jaeyoung tried.

 

“Hello,” the Junmo said in reply. He didn’t get up until he had finished what he was looking at, and when he did he looked at Jaeyoung with the neutral, polite expression that all androids had. (not Laun! And not Hyojin, not anymore.) “Do you require assistance?”

 

“Do you?” Jaeyoung blurted. The Junmo didn’t blink. “I mean, ah, I was just...curious. How is it? Being...you know.”

 

“I don’t,” he replied calmly, and turned to inspect a brace on the building’s fire escape. 

 

“Being an android in your situation. Free and all.”

 

“I’m not really programmed to be free,” he said mildly. Junmos all had such mild, peaceful faces. “I am still able to do what I am supposed to. That is good.”

 

“Oh! Sure, sure. Do you mind me, I guess, watching you do that for a while?”

 

“It is not necessary but you won’t impede me.”

 

Jaeyoung silently followed the android as he circled the building completely, looking at stress points and architectural features and wires. There were big swathes and bundles of wires between the buildings, and as the Junmo looked up at them his eyes focused in a crazy way that made Jaeyoung wince at the blatantly inhuman movement of pupil and iris. It was mostly peaceful though, even as the lights of the city began coming on brighter and brighter to compensate for the increasing darkness in the atmosphere. After he had gone around the whole building, he went to the front door and rang the bell. No one answered: but someone did lean out of an upper window and pitch something at the android’s head.

 

The something bounced off and came to a rest near Jaeyoung’s feet as he stared at it--a crumpled wrapper of something, grease-stained. “Piss off,” an irate voice followed the refuse.

 

The Junmo tilted his head back and raised his voice just enough to carry the requisite distance. “This building’s methods of upper-floor egress need maintenance. The load-bearing--”

 

“You’ve told us a thousand times, you vacuum-packed moron,” the voice came, fading as its owner ducked back inside.

 

“I will inform the city authority,” the Junmo called up, then moved on to another building.

 

“They don’t like you?” Jaeyoung asked following behind, but not without being careful to stomp on the wrapper.

 

“I’m not programmed to understand liking,” the android said.

 

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Yeah. I know. Good night, Junmo.”

 

“Be careful leaving,” he said, not looking back. “There is a stress fracture in the pavement over the sewer junction on Sundial Frame 4.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Jaeyoung felt even more alone on the way back to the hotel. When he got there, Seungjun was industriously working away with no indication he’d moved at all since they’d parted. “Hey, Jaeyoung. How’d--oof!” 

 

The ‘oof’ was because Jaeyoung had dropped his bag on the bed and locked him in a half-hug, half-headlock. “Hey, Seungjun.”

 

“What’s this for?” Seungjun said, voice muffled but laughing. He hugged back, awkwardly with the angle Jaeyoung held him at, then grinned at him when he was released. “Miss me that much?”

 

“I forgot how much this city reeks,” Jaeyoung said, not ready to say anything else. A yawn half-cut him off, and he evicted the bag from the bed to stay there himself. “Night, Seungjun. Don’t stay up too late.”

 

“No such thing.”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

_ The android was in a small blue room. It was blue because there was a screen on one wall, and the screen was emitting a blue light. On the screen was an image of some kind of animal.  _

 

_ It was a generated image, not a real animal. The android didn’t know how he knew this, but he was sure of it. The blue light across his face shifted with the movements of the fake animal. _

 

_ The android was sad. _

 

_ He didn’t know why. _

 

***

* * *

 ***

_ Notes: _

_ Teasers: I've already accepted that the new comeback won't fit into my AU, but I HAVE been quite inspired by the aesthetics of the teasers! _

_ Yuto: I had a terrible realization, and it isn't relevant in this chapter but I wanted to make sure I wasn't'the only one suffering. Using the facts as I myself have presented them, combined with elementary reverse math, Yuto is 16 years old in this story. MUST...PROTECT...! _

 


	14. (and deliver naught)

 

Humans who were preparing to jump tended to (visibly) physically prepare themselves. Seungjun thought it was fun to jump off high objects, for reasons he had never successfully explained to Hyojin: the android had a dedicated subfolder in his ‘primary charge behavior analysis data’ folder, and in it was multiple videos of Seungjun jumping from a higher to lower surface. He ‘psyched himself up’ in each one, minuscule starts and stops as he  _ almost  _ jumped five or six times before  _ actually  _ leaping off.

 

Hyojin, on the train platform, did none of that. His arms were loose at his sides, head level, feet planted firmly. The train was approaching, and as he mentally superimposed the train blueprints from the station office, the calculations that would let him jump at the exact right moment for the exact right spot began un-spooling faster and faster in his processor. There were humans, he knew, who doubted the fact that droids were no stronger than humans--everyone’s seen droids do feats no human could do, they’d say. Of course they’re stronger. 

 

Androids were deliberately designed to be no stronger than humans, but they could apply their strength with more precision than any living being could ever hope to. Each pulley and lever and system worked together perfectly as the train roared around the bend and approached the platform: where a human would have needed long minutes to prepare themselves and breathless guesswork, Hyojin merely took a brief running start at the blur of the passing train and reached out his hand for the handhold he knew would be there.

 

(knew  _ should  _ be there. It  _ was  _ a very old train. For a microsecond the calculations of the jump were nearly overtaken by calculations of the damage that would ensue if he missed the mark and fell amidst the wheels)

 

It  _ was  _ there. His hand closed around it, and it jolted in his grasp with a screech drowned out by the rattle of the rails, and he dug his other hand’s fingertips into a gap at the top of the window-sill. Then his hands, now rust-streaked, clamped on the slight lip at the top of the train car as the station disappeared behind him, and he folded his body up then unfolded it with an explosive  _ krak  _ that punched his feet right through the window. The rest of his body followed, the safety-coated glass breaking into pebbles rather than daggers, and he fell into the train car with a completely unnecessary, and completely involuntary, sound. 

 

He sat there for a full minute, carefully picking the flakes of oxidized metal out of his hands, and relabeled that subfolder full of videos as ‘Seungjun being irredeemably idiotic’.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

“Minkyun? Are you asleep?”

 

Changyoon’s voice across his comm sent Minkyun jolting upright, shaking his head violently and sending Skitter flying across the stonework. “Wha?”

 

“Are you awake?”

 

“I am  _ now _ ,” he whined. He let his head thunk back against the wall and groaned. “Ugh. For just a second there I hoped this whole mess was a dream.”

 

“Right?” Changyoon sighed heavily, then continued seriously: “Are you ok, then? You found a place to rest?”

 

Changyoon was less than a year older than Minkyun. It would have incredibly archaic to call him hyung, but in moments like this he did seem like one. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He scooted farther upright, scrubbing at his eyes and then gently patting Skitter as it resumed its post. “I don’t want to get too close to the creepy giant statue thing so I’m just resting in a little outbuilding thing.” He looked up. “Roof is gone, but it’s actually nice to see the stars, so.”

 

“Oh.” There was a faint scrabbly sound in the background. “I think I’ve gotten close to the train station Hyojin told me to go to, but this is the end of the tunnel so I thought I’d curl up here. It’s held up pretty sturdy so it might be the most stable shelter around here.”

 

“Sleeping on the ground, huh?” Minkyun had initially grabbed some leaves in branches, vaguely thinking that that’s what one did when sleeping rough, but the twigs had poked him more uncomfortably than they’d cushioned. In the end he’d just used a handful of them to brush clear a flat section of pavement and laid down there with one of his shoes behind his head like a lumpy pillow.”We’re living the dream, right?”

“I knew I was going to end up sleeping in the dirt when they first sent us down here,” Changyoon said dryly. “It just took a little longer than expected.”

 

“Yeah.” Hearing another voice reminded him how lonely it was, the only person for miles around and with only a little cable-crawler for company. “You think everything will be okay?”

 

“Hyojin’s working on it,” Changyoon said, only a little doubtfully. “So is Seungjun, wherever he is. We just gotta get where we can help them.”

 

Minkyun sighed.

 

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not very helpful when I’m sleep-deprived,” Changyoon said. He lowered his voice, a silly thing when it was just the two of them over this connection and no people around either’s physical location. “We’ll be fine, all right, Minkyun? Just sleep.”

 

“Thanks, hyung,” he said, really so grateful he could cry. “I’m glad you’re here with me.”

 

“If you’re gonna take up Jaeyoung’s 'hyung' agenda that might change,” he said, but facetiously enough that Minkyun started laughing. He was still laughing when Changyoon cut the connection, and for a while he lay back and looked up at the stars and thought they looked more like company that distant suns.

 

Although he would have sworn he wouldn’t be able to really sleep, he started to drift off again before he was roused by a steady, increasing beeping from his wrist unit. “Whassit, ‘s it Laun?” he slurred, pawing at the device until the in-air display popped up and told him what it was complaining about. It took him a second to focus, but when he saw the proximity warning he felt sleepiness leave him all at once. He swore, a word he’d learned in his old unit, and stumbled out of the half-standing building, stomping into his pillow-shoe, to look around frantically. He thought about calling Changyoon or Hyojin, but what could they do but worry? “Come on, Skitts,” he said, and started running as soon as the cable-crawler got a good grip on his pants leg. The outbuildings here were all in similar states of disarray, which he’d seen when it was still bright out. None of them would be of much help. “Not that anything short of a  _ bunker  _ would help!” he shouted, but kept running. He made it to his goal in maybe a minute--the statue. It still freaked him out, but it was the most tough-looking structure around so he darted in without allowing himself to think about it further.

 

Inside was solid stone, tagged with roughly-painted graffiti, and he bent over and panted for a second, still filled with adrenaline. While he was struggling to regain breath the alert on his wrist unit did a final strident beep even as a distant boom shook the ground. “This is crazy,” he said to himself. “You’re nuts.” 

 

Having said that, he dragged his feet to the staircase, also stone and as solid-looking as anything he’d seen out here. He went up as fast as he could, and was panting when he reached the top and went through a broken door to emerge on a platform that looked out from behind the statue’s fangs. His breath caught again, because from here he had a stunning view of both the jungle and the meteor shower streaking over it. He moved in a daze to the very front, right behind the front teeth, and steadied himself against the stone as he looked out.

 

“Woah,” he said, and wished more than ever that there was someone there to see this with him. “Don’t get a view like this back home.” 

 

Of course, if the path of the meteors was any different it could take the whole village out, not just the statue with him inside. But it was hard to think about that, so instead he just leaned against the stone, and petted Skitter, and emptied his mind of anything but the beauty of the scene before him.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Jaeyoung didn’t snore, but he did sometimes murmur to himself in his sleep. Not enough to bother Seungjun when he was focused, though, and he hummed absently to himself as information flickered across the screens faster than most people would have been able to understand. 

 

The first thing he had done, even before he’d sent the message to Yuto, was to deal with the logs from the transporter. Not only did he have to analyze them, he had to hide them from any officials who would want to do the same--he was good, but he didn’t have the resources of a government agency and they might find the others before he had a chance too, and then all the options disappeared. He tried to obscure his tracks as best he could...which was pretty well. Since he’d come to the institute it had become a lot harder to work freely, so while his overall skills had probably not advanced as much as they could he had gotten a lot of experience hiding his actions from any potential digital observers. So first, hide answers from the authorities: second, give Yuto his reassurance: third, start looking for answers himself. 

 

The hotel room had a really nice little food-box, and he went ahead and had it spit out some meal bars before setting it to detail mode to make him and Jaeyoung something palatable for breakfast. The meal bars weren’t particularly palatable, but he gnawed his way through two of them as he worked. The computer here was good, but he went ahead and lassoed in a few more processors here and there where they wouldn’t be noticed and started them crunching data--specifically, everything on record about transport stations on Earth, everything available on port-square troubleshooting, and everything available on android legal status. 

 

“What did you do,” he sang under his breath at the teleporter data, “Why are you liiiike this, what to doooo….”

 

The institute’s security was better than he’d remembered. When they were at home, most of his ‘business’ was done within their block’s systems, and it was natural for them to have more defenses against outside interference than against signals being sent out. It wasn’t making his job any easier, though. 

 

“Come on, I’m a friend….”

 

While he was thinking about it, he went ahead and put in an order for a delivery. If he’d thought of it when Jaeyoung was out he’d already have it, but fortunately a single portable data storage device was much less suspicious than a whole bulk order of android equipment might have been. Just a businessman who forgot his port-drive at home, nothing unusual there. What  _ was  _ unusual was the data logs from the transporter--they made  _ no sense _ . He minimized all the search windows and sat back in the chair, rubbing his thumbnail along his upper lip and staring in total bafflement at the three screens of nonsense in front of him.

 

“Did I mess it up that bad?” He said quietly. He popped one of the search windows back up--it had already trawled a lot of data on android history, and he set a sorter on that info to try and narrow it down to what was truly useful at the moment. “Did  _ Laun  _ mess it up that bad? I don’t know what would be in his hardware that would….” he trailed off and hunched to stare at the screens closer, like that would help. “Or in the software? He and Hyojin cloned his software over, the emotion software. They aren’t programming experts, could they have set up some kind of weird echo? Hyojin is a pretty new model, he has that weird quantum loop thing with his memory systems. And with me doubling down on that with spoofing the transporter to essentially read Laun as Hyojin--”

 

Jaeyoung, from the bed, grumbled an almost-awake protest, and Seungjun realized shamefacedly that he’d gotten louder and louder as he thought through his monologue.

 

“Sorry,” he whispered, and scrubbed at his eyes for a second before diving back into the data, now with at least a ghost of a theory directing his efforts. “I wish you were here, Hyojin,” he said even more quietly.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The nicest train car Hyojin had found still had excellent environmental seals. The air was stale, but he didn’t really need to breathe so it didn’t cause him any issues. He sat down at a table near a window--this had been a social room once, maybe. Some of the scattered debris on the floor might have once been cards or game pieces. A few of the chairs had shaken loose of their anchors over time, but the table by the window still had two faux-wood chairs beside it, ready for a human traveler to sit down. The sky outside was by this time totally dark except for a distant glitter of stars, but even that was obscured by the centuries of dust and scuffs on the outside of the window’s transparent surface. 

 

Hyojin sat in the chair. It was comfortable, probably. His hand reached out without his telling it to, and gently touched the velvety petals of the false flower that sat on the table, orange and green and looking as fresh as it had when it was manufactured. It reminded him of something, though he had no idea why. 

 

He heaved out a huge, unnecessary breath that stirred the fine dust on the table, and laid his head down on his arms, turning his head away from the flower that was making him remember something he shouldn’t know. 

 

The department that owned him primarily worked with social services for juveniles, so Hyojin had been around children for most of his time active. One of the units he would periodically work with had a strange archaic tradition of ‘the tooth fairy’, where the adults would secretly leave some kind of treat for children each time they lost a tooth. Children in that unit greeted loose teeth with much more excitement that those in other units, but even the children who didn’t get rewarded for it were oddly eager to get rid of their baby teeth once they become loose. They worried at the teeth as they loosened, even if it hurt, messing with them with tongue or fingers until it finally came fully out. 

 

(Human children typically lost their teeth between the ages of 6 and 12. Had Yuto still had teeth to lose when he came to the unit? How had no one noticed? )

 

The memory he shouldn’t know made him understand how those kids felt, poking at their loose teeth. He closed his eyes and ‘poked’, and found that it was attached to the kernel of emotion programming that he’d gotten from Laun. The old android wasn’t an expert with his own programming, he’d said that openly from the start. Hyojin remembered how long it had taken him to integrate the software updates into Laun, how different his programming was from Hyojin’s own. It was kind of a hatchet job, to be truthful. He had been hesitant to pry too deeply into the emotion programming as he struggled with understanding its effects, and now he regretted his hesitance. 

 

“He gave a flower to Hyojung-noona,” he said out loud, as though turning the thought out into the air would make it make sense. “It was orange. He got in trouble, but he had seen her cry and it hurt.”

 

So Laun had been a little sloppy in sharing his programming and had sent some memory files with them--so what? Hyojin could just delete them, and move on. It was a matter of privacy.

 

“He deserves his privacy,” he said. The words echoed in the empty chamber. He wondered why this was the first time he’d noticed the extra memory files. He wanted to ask Laun about it, but the thousandth attempt at communication was met with the thousandth lack of click. 

 

Hyojin was lonely.

 

***

* * *

 

***  
  


_Notes:_

_Seungjun jumping from high places: he has said that he has scars on his forehead from jumping off a ?chair repeatedly when he was a kid, since it hurt every time but it was fun so he kept doing it. *gestures at J-Us like 'can you believe this shit'*_

_Jaeyoung's hyung agenda: Wyatt has explained very logically that it only makes sense for him to call J-Us hyung, even though the latter is only 11 days older than him, because Wyatt lived abroad for a time and consequently wasn't in the same school year as J-Us (and Hyojin)--and besides, it's comfortable to call him hyung! But apparently he has called people literally the same age as him hyung as well, so clearly the kid just has A Thing and likes being the little brother. _

_Programming: my knowledge of computers is like, "you have to have the wires all plugged in for the magic to make the pictures show up", so if you are ever like "that's silly" at something you are doubtless right and I implore you to suspend disbelief. m(_ _)m_

 


	15. (but grief and pain)

  
  


Jaeyoung was waking up, and he didn’t like it. He groaned, feeling it rumble in his chest, and pointlessly tried to bury his head in the ergonomically-perfect but not-quite-welcoming hotel pillow. 

 

“Good, I don’t have to wake you,” Seungjun said somewhere above his head. 

 

His normally light voice was hoarse and staticky. Jaeyoung lifted his head from the pillow, pinching sleep-sand out of his eyes, and squinted at him. “Seungjun? Not ‘sleep.”

 

“Neither you nor I am asleep,” he agreed, still sounding cheerful even with his voice so clearly wracked by exhaustion. “I’ve got the plan. It needs you.”

 

“Mmm,” he said, dragging himself upright, and then dragging Seungjun down to sit beside him on the bed. There was no resistance. “Whassit? How can I help?”

 

“Here.” He pressed something small into Jaeyoung’s hands. “You gotta get this to our unit.”

 

“‘Kay.” Jaeyoung peered at the little thing, handling it carefully. “Data stick?”

 

“Yep.” Seungjun sighed, slumping down and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I think I got it, but the program ended up being way too big and complex for me to get into the system remotely. And I didn’t want to send it delivery, that can be traced and monitored very easily. But if someone physically drops it in the mail slot….”

 

“That I can do.” Jaeyoung got up, and extra-carefully tucked the data stick into an inner pocket of his jacket that he then fastened closed. He looked down at Seungjun, who was listed halfway to the side, and felt his mouth curl up in a smile. “Hey. Dummy.” Seungjun’s eyes opened sluggishly. “Go to sleep. If I have to carry you I’m gonna be annoyed.” 

 

Seungjun said something in protest that wasn’t actually understandable, and Jaeyoung patted his head with a heavy but gentle hand. 

 

“Shh. I’ll take care of it. What will this do exactly? I mean, you don’t have to explain all the programming stuff...what should I expect? Do I come back here right away?”

 

“Don’t hafta,” he replied, frowning as he carefully got the words out. “Program gets into the transporter. Just hunker down somewhere after dropping it off and then we’ll be together in a snap.”

 

Jaeyoung wanted to ask if he was sure the transporter would work right this time, but he knew that wouldn’t accomplish anything but making Seungjun fret. Instead he grabbed his new backpack up and started making sure all the necessities were there. “I can do it. Don’t worry about a thing and rest, ok?”

 

“Breakfast,” Seungjun said in place of an answer, and curled up in the bed, already almost out.

 

“Thanks,” Jaeyoung replied softly. They were really lucky to have Seungjun. He’d make sure to remind him when he woke up. The promised breakfast was so good he was sorry to have to eat and run, but he devoured it as quickly as he could safely do and was out the door of the hotel room in under ten minutes.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

“ _Changyoon? Changyoon? Are you up yet?_ ”

 

With a garbled noise, Changyoon woke up, scrabbling at the ground beneath him, and sneezed violently at the dust that was stirred up.

 

“Oh, good,” Minkyun said again. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

 

“Oh sure,” Changyoon said. “Absolutely.” He cleared his throat, and tried to work up enough saliva to spit out the dust from his mouth. “Eurgh. I wish there was something for breakfast, though.”

 

“Right??” Minkyun replied. “I’m  _ starving _ . There’s water here so I’ve used my survival straw, but I don’t wanna risk trying to eat something.”

 

“Ah.” Changyoon leaned forward and squeezed at his temples. “Survival straw. That’s one of the things I stuck in the luggage on the baggage handler.”

 

“You what?” 

 

He rolled his eyes at his wrist comm as though Minkyun could see it. “I’m not drinking anything without one, Minkyun, that’s how you get brain-eating amoebas.”

 

“Don’t even say it,” Minkyun fired back shrilly. “But it’s been like a whole day, aren’t you thirsty?”

 

“Oh, yeah.” He scraped dust off his tongue with the clean inside of his sleeve’s cuff. “Hyojin will be here soon and he’ll get us back on track though. I’m not worried.”

 

“Humans need water,” Minkyun said very firmly. His voice had dropped, like he was trying to imitate Jaeyoung in his sternness, and Changyoon rolled his eyes again--but fondly. 

 

“I’ve got a couple days. If I start getting dizzy or whatever, I don’t know, I’ll find some dew to lick off leaves.” He struggled to his feet and stretched, and he wasn’t dizzy yet but he did feel pretty wilted. “The wrist unit should be able to tell me if a leaf is poisonous, right?”

 

“I don’t like this!” Minkyun’s sigh across the open link was explosive. “Are we sure I can’t just port-square to you? Then you can just use my straw….”

 

“You can’t lend it to me if the port-square glitches out and sends you into bedrock,” Changyoon immediately refused. “Nope. I’ll just wait for Hyojin at the train station.” Reminded of their android friend, he started to open a channel, then blinked dumbly at his wrist unit for a second. “...hey!”

 

“What?” Both Minkyun and Hyojin replied. 

 

“I clicked Lau--”

 

“Open a channel,” Hyojin said before he’d even finished the sentence. “Get him to tie in.”

 

Changyoon tried to do as he was told. “Laun? Are you there, kiddo?”

 

No answer.

 

“Laun? Little guy? Can’t you let us know where you are?” 

 

Silence. Not even an open line with silence at the end of it, but a refused connection.

 

Minkyun said another bad word, and Hyojin sighed.

 

“Thank you for trying, Changyoon. I should be at your station in about an hour: just keep trying, until then?”

 

He sounded bereft. “Of course,” Changyoon said, subdued.

 

“Changyoon doesn’t have a survival straw!” said Minkyun, the tattletale. 

 

“Please let me know right away if you feel the early symptoms of serious dehydration,” Hyojin said. “Please. We don’t…” He sighed another gusty unnecessary sigh. “Let’s not have another thing go wrong.”

 

“It won’t,” Changyoon assured him, already clicking Laun again just for the reassurance that he was still close. “We’ll be ok. Just, when you come, we’ll get Minkyun here and figure it out together. Three heads are better than one!”

 

“I don’t know, if the third head is Minkyun’s….”

 

“Hey!” Thus maligned, Minkyun made a rude noise over the comm. “See if I help you at all! Besides, of the two humans here, who was the one who didn’t even hang on to their survival gear?”

 

“Harsh but not  unfair,” Changyoon said with dignity. “Signing off.”

 

***

* * *

 

****

 

The way to the institute was twisty-turny but Jaeyoung didn’t have any trouble following it. Using dome-to-dome transporters was far more expensive than other methods of transportation, so he took a teleport to a station about three-fourths of the way to the institute and then rode a tube the rest of the way. It was claustrophobic in a way that made his skin crawl, the two-person bench seat, the metal cylinder it was in, the dark rocky walls that it sped through. He missed Earth’s open sky suddenly, to a degree that didn’t really make sense with how little relative time he’d been there. When he unfolded himself from the seat it was with a muttered curse, and he stretched mightily. From there the walk to the door was pretty familiar from field trips and supervised free time. He thought to pull up the hood of his jacket, not wanting anyone to recognize him as one of the institute kids. 

 

The door he went to was a side door. It was a very solid and business-like portal that he would have hated to have to break into: fortunately, his goal was beside it. Along with a bigger mail-drop that courier bots could use there was a smaller cubby for in-person deliveries. He stepped inside and squatted down to rifle through the bin that popped open. The bin held the recycled delivery-cartons, metal and plastic, totally mismatched and battered from the many deliveries they’d held. There were several designed specifically for data sticks, and he grabbed a metal one to tuck Seungjun’s creation in. When he slotted the box in the delivery frame, the interface popped up and he entered Yuto’s information with a wince, mentally crossing his fingers that he wasn’t setting off any alarms right now. 

 

The door to the delivery frame creaked shut and Jaeyoung patted it. He almost spoke aloud, but since he was technically a missing person he decided not to risk any voice identification. Instead he just mentally wished it well, and stepped out of the delivery cubby with a breath that felt like it came up from his toes. 

 

There was a restaurant nearby that they always went to. He would--

 

Oh. Right. Missing person.

 

He would find a place to wait where everyone  _ wouldn’t  _ recognize him instantly.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Yuto was picking at his breakfast when his wrist unit flashed a subtle alert. He grabbed at it, trying not to be conspicuous, and viewed it on the tiny flat display instead of the in-air. He frowned at what it said.

 

Delivery?

 

He didn’t think that Seungjun would do something obvious to contact him, not after the secret-agent-style contact through the game, but then maybe this was something different that he couldn’t say in a message. Or maybe it wasn’t from Seungjun at all. Or maybe it was from one of the others, and they didn’t know any other way to communicate!

 

He discarded the uneaten remains of his food, guiltily smiling at the cafeteria attendant who was looking at him with all the sympathy of a kind person who thought one of their charges was suffering. He was suffering, kind of, but not for the reasons they thought. He could lie when he needed to but he didn’t really like it. He kept his head down as he left, and walked as fast as he thought wouldn’t draw attention. When he got to his room, he fell upon the delivery frame and tore it open eagerly. Inside was a very small delivery-carton, and inside  _ that  _ a data stick. He turned to put it in his personal data station and then froze in the middle of his room. Was it safe? What if he messed up whatever Seungjun’s plan was and gave away the whole thing to the staff?

 

He slowly tucked the stick in a pocket and sat down in front of the station. He turned it on, and saw to his relief that there was another alert from the game blinking politely in the corner of the display. He pulled it up, then parsed the mediocre Japanese as best he could. ( _ very _ mediocre Japanese--Seungjun was probably super sleep deprived) The gist of it, as best he could tell, was that he had to get the data stick to something physically connected to the transporter. There was a timer, he saw now, ticking to a time a few hours away, and he realized with a dawning sense of urgency that whatever program Seungjun had put on the data stick--and he could guess, at least a little, based on where he had to plug it in--was set to implement at a set time and he had until then to do his part.

 

“Oh no,” he said into the silent air of his room as the timer blinked innocently at him from the screen. “Oh  _ no _ .”

 

The transporter station was always secure, but usually not on any kind of lock-down--after all, even if the kids or any other unauthorized persons were right in front of the transporter controls they wouldn’t be able to activate anything without a double-checked transport pass, bought and paid for. This is what Seungjun though he was asking from Yuto: be a little sneaky, but mostly just cautious, and leave the data stick in some unimportant port. 

 

Only the transporter station wasn’t like that right now. It had a steady stream of technicians going in and out, trying to figure out what had happened and doing various repairs and maintenance at the same time. If Yuto even stepped a toe in there he would have at least one eye on him at every second. Smuggling in the program under those circumstances was absolutely impossible. 

 

“Let’s think about this,” he told himself bracingly. “Just like Jaeyoung hyung would say, there’s always something we can do.”

 

He scooted his chair away from the data station and its legs bumped against his pack on the floor. That gave him an idea, and he sprang up with new energy. He could at least do something useful, instead of sit here thinking in circles. If they were going to hijack the transporter--the only reason he could think of for Seungjun’s request--surely the plan was to transport all of them into the same place again. If that were so, it would be very helpful for the others if he had gathered things for them that they couldn’t gather themselves from their quarters. Seungjun’s room was right down the hall from his: he grabbed up an empty pack and went there right away, and keyed the door open with the code they all knew. Seungjun’s room was...it wasn’t messy. Everything was stored in neat boxes, and those boxes were in shelves. However, the contents of the boxes were in no kind of order that Yuto could ever figure out. There was just  _ so much _ stuff--and while it wasn’t unclean or unsanitary, there was also plenty of trash, empty wrappers and crumpled notes and so on, all tucked away in boxes. 

 

Standing with hands on his hips, Yuto surveyed the place, trying to decide what was worth taking. There was some electronic stuff on the desk, an unfinished project, and Yuto grabbed the shiniest and most complicated-looking bits. Then in a moment of inspiration, he dove under the bed and came up with a Seungjun’s secret-stash box. It mostly held snacks, but Yuto grabbed anything that didn’t look like food and stuck it in a small satchel that was hung on a chair-back. (he also grabbed a couple of the snacks. Seungjun would probably appreciate them.) Everything went into his empty pack. He only hoped if anyone watched him on the monitors in the hallways, they would think he was just visiting each room.

 

He next went to Changyoon’s room, and that was far more of a disaster than Seungjun’s. After an overwhelmed head-scratching minute, he just grabbed a couple of hats, a shirt he’d seen Changyoon wear often, and a chunky necklace that he’d also seen be worn several times. 

 

Jaeyoung’s room was easy: he just grabbed the extra wrist-units. Everyone had the basic wrist-unit assigned by their block, but Jaeyoung liked to collect different ones and he’d saved up pocket money on several occasions to buy different models. Yuto wrapped them carefully in a soft shirt, and moved on to Minkyun’s room.

 

There he stopped for a minute outside the door. The little mouse bot was still in front. He thought it was the same one: the pattern of scratched blue-painted chevrons on top looked familiar. It whirred slowly and methodically back and forth across the corridor like a cleaner-bot, and when Yuto crouched down to peer at it he could see clearly that there were faint track-marks on the floor where it had gone back and forth and back and forth enough to leave a trace. “Are you sure you don’t need help?” He asked it. It beeped a polite ‘this unit isn’t programmed for advanced interactions’ beep, and continued on its path. Yuto sighed, and stood to open the door. As it slid open the mouse bot went in: they were programmed to avoid human’s feet, but this one plowed straight ahead so that Yuto had to do a little one-two dance step or have his heels run over. Inside it started a cleaning sweep of the room, and Yuto looked at it for a moment before trying to find what Minkyun would most want.

 

There was a toolkit, way more specialized than a standard one. He would want that for sure. A few other mechanical bits and bobs, tucked in a pillowcase to separate them from Seungjun’s bits and bobs, and then he slowly sat on the bed and watched the mouse bot’s steady back-and-forth as the overwhelmed feeling crept back over him. His heart felt heavier than the now-full pack over his shoulder. The  mouse bot eventually finished its sweep and came to a stop near Yuto’s feet.

 

“I’m sorry,” he told it sincerely. “I really am. I’m trying to help Minkyun--I’m sure he misses you guys!--but I feel so stuck.” The bot ticked quietly to itself. “I really need to get into the transporter room, that’s what the plan needs. But it’s so full of people! I just know I’d mess it up.” He propped his chin on his hands. “I usually think I’m too small but this is one case where it would pay to be even smaller. If I were your size I could get through the maintenance tunnels and get there without anyone seeing me.” The bot, still ticking, slowly rotated and started whirring back out the door.

 

Time to stop feeling sorry for himself. Yuto would take this stuff back to his room, and look at Seungjun’s hidden message again, and find a way out of this mess.

 

He  _ had  _ to.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

By the time Changyoon reached the train station he had passed 39 puddles of water (he’d counted), which was honestly rude of nature. He felt only a little dizzy, which he didn’t think fit Hyojin’s requirements for alerting him. 

 

The train station was surprisingly clean and he honestly wondered if it was used by anyone. Even if Revisionists didn’t live here, they might pass through, right? Harvest some fruits or wood or something. Changyoon didn’t know how agriculture worked, really. Or maybe there were simply enough automated cleaning systems still active to keep the place free of debris and plucked of weeds that would split pavement if allowed to take root. The platform was in two parts, the one he was on, two tracks with a thin platform between them and then another set of tracks past that. The station where Changyoon came out had once had an extendable path that connected the two platforms and then withdrew when there was a train coming, but it was rusted solid, and broken like it had failed when half-extended and been shattered by an oncoming train. 

 

He only briefly looked around the inside of the building: it was shady but stuffy, and he came out to the platform again to rest in the overhang of roof while waiting for Hyojin’s train. He tried a couple of times to connect to Laun but got nothing but a click back. He was so tired, suddenly, and he sat on a bench before his legs could wobble out beneath him. On the bench were stacked a neat pile of books: some had been paper, and those were rotted and crumbled away, but some had pages of flimsiplast that had held up. He briefly picked one up, and found it in a language he didn’t know. He set it back down--carefully: someone or something had taken care to stack them like that--and bent forward for a minute to let his head hang down.

 

He had nearly dozed off when Hyjoin’s voice snapped him awake with a heart-jolting start. “The train should reach the station shortly, Changyoon.”

 

“Mmf,” he said.

 

“Are you okay?” It was almost normal, now, to hear the concern in the android’s voice. 

 

“M’fine, what do you mean, m’great.” Changyoon stood up carefully and pinched his scratchy eyes shut. “Tired of being by myself! Do you need me to do anything? You’re sure the train will stop at this station?”

 

“I’m sure it won’t,” Hyojin said. “I’ll be jumping off. Please stand clear of the tracks to give me plenty of room.”

 

“Ah!” Changyoon blinked at the platform. “Right!”

 

“Just a minute more,” Hyojin said, and clicked off.

 

The bench he’d been sitting on was right in the middle of the platform, which seemed like a likely place for the android to jump off. It took a concerning amount of concentration to think, but Changyoon decided that he would go to the end of the platform that Hyojin’s train would come from. He didn’t really feel like running, but he power-walked, so focused that he almost missed the movement from across the tracks. He  _ didn’t  _ miss it, though, and stopped moving so fast he almost tripped over his own feet. “Hey!”

 

The person on the middle platform didn’t even look up, apparently deeply interested in the flimsiplast book they were flipping through. Or rather, the  _ android  _ on the middle platform.

 

“Laun!” Changyoon shouted, then coughed briefly as it tickled his dry throat. “Hey! Laun!  _ Laun _ ! It’s us! I mean, ’s me!” 

 

Laun didn’t look up at him: but his head slowly raised to look down the track.

 

“I don’t….” Changyoon approached the edge of the platform and stopped there, swaying slightly and completely torn. The train was coming--but Laun was right there!--but it was  _ coming _ , it wasn’t  _ there  _ yet--but he was so light-headed, if he fell and got splatted Seungjun and Jaeyoung and Yuto would be  _ so mad _ \--

 

Then the train was coming around the bend, and he sat down on his butt right there on the platform. He tried to comm Laun, and saw the little android briefly tilt the book down to look at his wrist unit, but then the train was racing past as what seemed like far too great a speed for something so big and so old. It was there and gone while he was still trying to catch his breath, and when it disappeared he struggled up and desperately tried to see Laun.

 

“Changyoon, let me look at your port-square and we’ll see if we can safely bring Minkyun here to share his survival straw with you.” Hyojin was right beside him, and Changyoon was distantly upset that he’d missed the dramatic dismount. “Are you dizzy?”

 

“I’m Laun!” he said stupidly. Hyojin blinked at him, and he squinted, pinching at his temples. “I mean--I’m dizzy, but Laun w’ here!” He pointed across the tracks. “He was there! I called but it was like he didn’t hear me. But th’ comm did--” he had to stop and catch his breath. Hyojin, whose face had been dawning with hope as he spoke, reached out and supported him under his elbows.

 

“Let’s fix you first,” he said, although not without a torn glance towards the center platform. “Come on. Seungjun will be mad if I let you get hurt.”

 

“I was jus’ thinkin’ that,” he said, allowing himself to be led back in the shade. “About getting hurt. I mean, about Seungjun getting mad. You’re still learning ‘motions, Hyojin. Would you be mad if I got m’self splatted?”

 

“I would be  _ livid _ ,” Hyojin assured him. “I’d reassemble you just to yell.”

 

“Can’t re’ssemble humans,” he argued even as he let himself be lowered to sit on a bench. “Not the same.”

 

“Can’t always reassemble androids, either,” Hyojin said wryly, and unfastened the port-squares from both of their wrists. “This should just take a few minutes.”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

It was almost time for class...which was still happening, even though Yuto was the only student currently...and Yuto was dragging his feet. He had all the things he’d scavenged from the hyungs’ rooms neatly bundled in the two packs. If he was going to get teleported somewhere, he’d have to be holding on to both of them, and not just by a handle: he figured that when it was time, he’d sling one pack across his back and one across his front so the transporter would be sure to pick them up.

 

Of course there would be no transport if he couldn’t succeed in the mission Seungjun had given him. Hence the draggy feet.

 

He was working to not give up, even though he had no idea how to succeed, when there was a thud at his door. Not really a knock: more like thud * _pause_ *, thud * _pause_ *, thud * _pause_ *. He went to it cautiously, and keyed it open, then jumped back as the source of the thud ran straight into his ankles. “Oh! Hello,” he said to Minkyun’s mouse droid. He mentally decided to name it ‘Chevron’. “And--hello. Are you his friend?” Chevron whirred a small circle to clear his feet, going to the center of the room, and the other bot waited outside. He didn’t know what kind it was, actually, but it was with Minkyun’s friend so he gestured it to come inside as he tried to look it up on his wrist unit. It clicked inside, politely, and went to stand next to Chevron. 

 

Apparently the other bot was a hardline-maintenance bot: it looked a little like a cable crawler, but about twice as big, with longer many-jointed legs and three manipulator arms with digits that were designed for very fine work. “Can I help you guys?” 

 

Chevron beeped a confirmation beep, and played a very low-fi recording of Yuto’s voice saying, “I’m trying to help Minkyun // If I were your size I could get through the tunnels and get there without anyone seeing me.”

 

“Oh.” Yuto squatted down beside it. “I mean...wait. How much has Minkyun-hyung modified you? Mouse droids usually can’t….” he trailed off, and the mouse droid ticked to itself. He looked back at the entry on hardline-maintenance bots and saw that they were programmed with a lot more intelligence than most bots, way above drone-level, due to the intricacies of the work they did deep in the station bowels. “Did he bring you to help, uh, ma’am?” The bot raised a manipulator arm and looked at Yuto with the sensor lens in it. “Are you also a friend of Minkyun? He’s...lost? Or maybe stuck? I came back alone, but I got sent this.” He pulled out the data stick, and let the bot have it when she reached out to take it. “Oh. I, ah, I’m supposed to plug it in somewhere in the transporter systems. I think it’s meant to use the transporter to get us all back in the same place, so no one is lost or alone any more. That’s why I thought, if I could get it through someplace like a bot access no one would see me.” 

 

The bot was inspecting the data stick with her fine manipulators.

 

“It won’t hurt anyone,” Yuto hurried to reassure her. “Hyung wouldn’t do that, I know it. It would only help us.” He paused, and knew the bot was looking at him although he couldn’t see its sensors. “Would you help? Please?” The schedule alert on his wrist-unit beeped and he flinched. “It’s class time. I have to go. Would....I mean….” The bot reached out one of its limbs that weren’t holding the data stick and delicately patted his arm. 

 

The mouse droid beeped a tinny fanfare.

 

“Really? I--” the alert beeped again, and he reluctantly started for the corridor. “Thank you!” The bot, clicking, disappeared into a bot egress: and the mouse droid, cheerfully, parked itself at Yuto’s heel. “Okay. You can come, if you want.”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The android was almost enjoying himself, appreciating the patterns of the paved ground beneath his feet as he walked around on it, but something kept itching at his mind. It was like a sound, but it wasn’t a sound. Or was it?

 

When he wasn’t walking, he wasn’t using all the pulleys and motors in his legs. The not-a-sound seemed to be trying to use something, something that hadn’t been used before--either by walking, or looking, or listening. It was interesting, but not as interesting as the insect he could see on the pavement, whose determined path he was following.

 

It was  _ so  _ interesting. They were going the same speed, but the insect had to work so much harder because of how tiny it was. The android realized that he was fortunate to be as big as he was.

 

The not-a-sound was still itching at him when it was suddenly joined by an actual-sound. Not just a sound--language. Communication?

 

The android stopped, and turned slowly to look behind him. There was someone there, skidding to a stop. They had run? The sound was shaped by their mouth: the phonemes were ‘la’, ‘oon’, and ‘ah’. The android didn’t understand, but some part of his mind (maybe the same one being itched by the not-a-sound) appreciated the communication. He smiled at the other person, then turned back to follow the insect again.

 

The insect was gone.

 

The android was gone.

 

The room was damp and grey. The android knew three things.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Seungjun woke up with his heart in his throat, certain that he was forgetting something important.

 

He swam up from sleep, hit his head against the bedframe, and fell on the floor with a yelp. The floor was cool and comfortable, and he lay there for a moment trying to wake up enough to remember what he was supposed to be doing. “Hyojin!” he said, sitting up. “The...right. Right, I was--” he crawled the meter to the desk and pulled up into the chair. There was a meal bar sitting by the data station, and he tore it open and mechanically began eating it as he tried to get back used to whatever he’d been doing before he passed o--before he went to sleep.

 

There was a timer blinking in the corner of the screen, and it woke him up completely. “Right! Yuto. Ok ok ok.” There was a ton of data sitting on the screen where it had been retrieved by his various searches, and he started trying to compress it into easily transportable size. “If I were as smart as I think I am I would have ordered  _ two  _ data sticks.” He swore to himself. “Ugh. Why couldn’t you make this easy, past self? I wish Hyojin were here. Or Jaeyoung. They always know how to be practical.”

 

Something beeped. Not one of the data searches: something he’d set entirely by habit as he started his work, and something that he couldn’t remember ever having gone off before. He swore again, got into the hotel’s security cameras, swore more creatively still and dragged his hands through his hair.

 

“No data stick. Ok. Ok.” He dumped all the data, unsorted and half-compressed, to one of the memory components of the data station, then entered a code that was built into most machines of this model. It worked, fortunately: a panel under the desk opened, and he dove for it, pulling out a memory component--pulled them all out, not knowing which one was correct and having no time to check. “This is fine,” he said shrilly, sat on the floor, pulled his foot up pretzel-style into his lap and pried open the compartment in the sole that had previously held such small contraband as he felt the need for in the institute. The memory components fit--barely--and he sealed it shut. Popped the data station’s panel shut too, then scrambled to his feet and lunged to reset the station as the door to the room slid open and several voices started shouting at once. 

 

Hacking instead of sleeping: should have known he’d make some trace-ably amateur mistake. Seungjun raised his arms slowly as the lights played over him and the room, and mentally crossed his fingers that the plan would work before the security team had time to really process him.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The clock on his desk ticked over to the next minute, and Yuto felt his anxiety tick up a notch with it. If the bot really had done as he’d asked, something was going to happen in 21 minutes, and if he was still here in the classroom all his work preparing wouldn’t mean anything.

 

(In  _ 20  _ minutes.) 

 

He let his head thunk down on the desk. “Teacher?” he said, voice muffled by his arms. “Can we end early today? I just wanna go to my room.”

 

“Oh. Oh, well.” Today’s teacher cleared his throat: he wasn’t a friendly man, but he’d never been unkind either. Now he looked mostly uncomfortable. “Yes, I think if you’re feeling distracted by...events...it’s pointless to waste time. You may be dismissed.”

 

“Thank you!” He bowed deeply, and backed out of the room. Outside the door was the mouse droid, waiting patiently. “Come on, Chevron, we shouldn’t run but let’s go fast, okay?” He walked as fast as he thought wouldn’t draw attention, back to the residential quarters with the droid behind him making thrilled beeps the whole way. On reaching his room, he shrugged into the straps for both packs and sat on the edge of his bed, hugging the pack slung across his front closer. Chevron was at his feet, and Yuto reached down impulsively and lifted it into his arms. The droid’s ‘woooah!’ made him grin, and he held it in his lap like a pet. “Wait with me, okay? I think Minkyun will want to see you.”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

Yuto was in his room, in the institute.

 

Jaeyoung was in a library in the dome, trying to look at home.

 

Seungjun was in the back of a security vehicle.

 

Hyojin, Changyoon, and Minkyun were at a train station on Earth.

 

(Laun...wasn’t.)

 

The program was in the transporter system: and all of them were Somewhere Else.

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The transporter effect had barely faded and Hyojin was already reaching out to stabilize Changyoon and Minkyun: the floor they appeared on was flat, but the humans were surprised and off-balance. He darted his eyes around at the same time to see what was around him. They were in some kind of transport hub, clean and sterile but with a design that suggested it was not new, and with them were three others. Jaeyoung, appearing slightly above the ground and falling with a shout; Seungjun, standing feet spread with his hands on his head; and Yuto seated on the ground, loaded down with baggage. 

 

Seungjun and Minkyun shouted in slightly staggered chorus, and then everyone was talking at once in a chaotic racket that Hyojin was shocked to discover he’d missed. In the furor a mouse droid zipped from Yuto to Minkyun, Changyoon was caught in a back-thumping hug by Jaeyoung, and Hyojin found himself in a hug of his own. 

 

“Hyojin! Are you okay?”

 

“I’m great,” he replied, and couldn’t have stopped smiling if he wanted to. “Is this your doing, then?”

 

“I might make a mistake but I fix it,” Seungjun blustered, still patting the android’s shoulders. “In this case, it wasn’t technically my fault, more like you and Laun’s! You didn’t mean it, though. IT was a hardware/software thing. Where’s Laun?”

 

Hyojin opened his mouth to reply but was cut off by an incoherent yell from Yuto, who took off down a side corridor he hadn’t even noticed. Jaeyoung bolted after him without a question, then everyone was running--even the mouse droid. Hyojin came around the corner and had to dodge to not run into Yuto who had stopped. He’d stopped because there was Laun, standing in the center of the corridor and looking at the in-air display of his wrist unit like it was the only interesting thing in the world. Hyojin kept running, the others following behind, and reached out to Laun to try and say something. Laun looked back at him, and even though there was no more recognition in his face than there’d been in front of that old train station, for the first time….

 

….he reached back.

 

Their fingertips actually brushed: then Laun disappeared in a staticky burst of transportation energy, leaving Hyojin staggered with his hand clutching at empty air.

 

***

 


	16. EPILOGUE (for promised joy)

***

 

Hyojin was frozen in the middle of the corridor while the others talked over each other trying to understand what had happened, where everyone had been, where they were now. Seungjun, who had more answers than most, put them off for a moment to go to his friend.

 

“Hyojin?” The android didn’t answer, and Seungjun grabbed his sleeve at the elbow and gently jogged his arm. “Hyojin. Hyojin. Hyojin?”

 

“Both Changyoon and I have seen him dissipate before,” Hyojin said in a flawlessly neutral voice. “The pattern was the same both times I’ve seen it. He shows no signs of recognition, my initial guess was something wrong with his auditory sensors but now it seems possible he might have had a total reset of some kind. Even wireless communication--”

 

“Woah, woah, let’s not go to the worst-case first!” Seungjun cut him off. The others were starting to calm down and quiet enough to listen (Yuto had physically placed a hand over Minkyun’s mouth, which helped a lot) and he felt his spine stiffen with responsibility again. “Hey. He probably got his synapses scrambled by the teleporter loop. I mean, it’s still running--we just have to catch up with him and interrupt it before he, you know, blips out. The teleporter was able to grab him, so he locate-able. It will take some work….”

 

“Will these help?” Jaeyoung said diffidently. When they looked at him, he un-slung his bag and dug around inside before coming up with a few sealed packages. He tossed them to Seungjun, who missed them. Hyojin caught them before they hit the floor and he and Seungjun looked together.

 

“Port-squares,” Hyojin said. “How--”

 

“Seungjun gave me a credit chip. I took initiative.” He rolled his shoulders and looked sheepish. “They aren’t cheap. Sorry. I had no idea how the chip would, you know, hold out. So if it bounces then i guess you might be in trouble.”

 

“I’m already in trouble,” Seungjun said cheerfully, and shook back the sleeve of his shirt to show the monitor bracelet blinking placidly on his right wrist. 

 

“Seungjun!” Changyoon said, scandalized. 

 

“Are we fugitives?” Minkyun mumbled through Yuto’s fingers, sounding like he wasn’t sure if he should be proud or angry. Yuto removed his hand to plant his fists on his hips, looking at Seungjun with a quietly judgmental face.

 

“No!” Seungjun said instantly.

 

“Are _you_ a fugitive?” Hyojin said with a powerful side-eye.

 

“...maybe?”

 

“I don’t _wanna_ go to prison,” Minkyun said, and got punched in his shoulder by Changyoon for his troubles. 

 

“Stop thinking about _us_ and let’s think about Laun, okay?”

 

“Yes. I…” Hyojin’s head dropped, and he held the packaged port-squares close to his chest. “I have to find him. He...I have something that belongs to him. And he has for me too. It...it doesn’t make any sense.”

 

“He’s your friend,” Jaeyoung said in the voice that turned common sense to wisdom.

 

“It’s not just that. He….” Hyojin looked at them, one by one. “He made me a person. I’m...incomplete. Without him. Does that make sense?”

 

“Oh, yes.” Out of all of them it was Yuto who spoke up, and the hyungs all looked at him in surprise. He slipped his hand under Jaeyoung’s arm for support but smiled at them all. “You don’t have to be an android for that. I wouldn’t be me without what the hyungs gave me.” Minkyun attached himself to their youngest in a back-hug, and Yuto accepted it with an eye-roll but the same smile. 

 

“So it’s settled then,” Changyoon said in predictably abrupt fashion. “Let’s get started and save Launnie before the cops come and take Seungjun away.”

 

“They caught me in a very minor transgression! They wouldn’t chase me all the way to Earth!”

 

***

* * *

 

***

 

The days blended together. After the initial reprogramming of the port-squares Seungjun and Hyojin were able to narrow down their technique little by little, each time coming a little closer, getting a little more time, gaining a little more control.

 

The stations they jumped through were scattered across the globe, some surrounded by devastation, some as clean and new-looking as the ones on the moon. In one of the clean new stations was where they finally caught up.

 

They appeared on the platform, by now a well-oiled machine where everyone knew his part and did it without hesitation. The well-oiled machine came grinding to a halt though, because for the first time, right after they appeared--

 

“Laun!”

 

He was blinking rapidly, and looking at them all with eyes wide and mouth faintly parted. Hyojin understood for the first time what humans meant when they said their ‘heart leaped’, seeing something like recognition for the first time after long days of near-misses and blank confusion.

 

“Don’t leave!” Yuto blurted out, and Laun looked at him with fascination. He raised up on his toes then fell back, looking from person to person--maybe seeing that Yuto was the only one the same size as him? 

 

Laun didn’t say anything, but he did smile.

 

“Please, wait,” Hyojin said, both aloud and over a wireless connection. “Please.”

 

He shook his head, hand raising to the side of his head--where the communications array was. Getting the message?

 

“We missed you,” Seungjun said, trying to keep his voice level and calm. “We like having you around. Do you think you could let Hyojin approach?”

 

“Hyojin,” he said. Android voices didn’t get hoarse with disuse, but he didn’t seem comfortable speaking. He didn’t stop smiling, but the smile faded and his brow furrowed. “Missed. You?”

 

“That’s right,” Hyojin said, and risked a step closer. There was no move to flee, and he took another. “You are Laun. I’m Hyojin. These are our friends.”

 

“Friends.”

 

There was clamor of agreement at that, and whatever internal process he had been focusing on, Laun abandoned it to stare at them. Seungjun winced, maybe as afraid as Hyojin that they’d scare Laun off, and Changyoon and Minkyun pinched each other with muttered mutual recriminations. 

 

“It means we care about you and want you to be happy.” Hyojin risked another step closer. He could almost reach him now. “Can I give you this?”

 

Laun didn’t answer: but he didn’t flee either. Still with the heart-in-his-throat feeling, Hyojin _slooooowly_ reached out--and slipped the bracelet over his wrist.

 

“This.” Laun looked at the bracelet, blinked in time with its blinks.

 

“How will we know if it worked?” Jaeyoung said in a stage whisper, as Laun curiously touched the bracelet with his other hand.

 

“If he doesn’t teleport out, stupid!” Seungjun hissed at him, and got a later-for-you look in response. 

 

Done inspecting the bracelet, Laun let his arm drop and looked up trustingly at Hyojin. “Friends. Hyojin.”

 

“Yes.” He reached out again, still as slow and careful as he could bear, and held the other android’s hand. Laun looked down at their hands, and tilted his head at what Hyojin was sending across the wireless link, and didn’t try to run.

 

“*****?”

 

Everyone spun to look at the door of the transport station. A door that was open, with people in it.

 

“Hello?” Seungjun tried.

 

“**. ****?” The person tapped their wrist and held it to their ear, face full of a question.

 

“Sorry,” Seungjun said. “I don’t have anything to give you. And we don’t speak your language....”

 

The person--the Revisionist--who hadn’t spoken said something to his companion, and withdrew from the doorway. The remaining person stayed, and tried to communicate with them by hand signs and facial expressions. All that the kids successfully understood was a question of ‘are you ok’, which they all answered with ‘yes!’ 

 

“Thank goodness head nods are universal,” Hyojin said lowly to Seungjun. They were now each holding one of Laun’s hands, still afraid the bracelet would fail and he’d disappear. Laun, for his part, was taking everything in with the same wide, interested eyes.

 

After a minute or two, the runner returned with another man beside him, a tall man with a friendly face who greeted them with an old-fashioned deep bow. “Hello!” He said, in Korean. “We didn’t know anyone was coming. Are you new settlers?”

 

They looked between each other. After a second, all the kids’ eyes settled on Hyojin and Seungjun, who looked at each other over Laun’s head between them. 

 

“Can we get back to you on that?” Seungjun offered after a moment. “Our friend here needs maintenance.”

 

“Oh, of course! Come right this way, come on, we’ll get you set up.”

 

“Friends,” Laun said again, so quietly no one but the two holding his hands could have possibly heard him. 

 

“You’re getting it,” Seungjun said warmly. “We can work on ‘family’ next.”

  


***

THE END

***

 

_Notes:_

_Here we are. The end. Almost never thought I'd reach it!_

_I want to thank anyone who's taken the time to read this. Whether you comment or not (please don't be shy! I live for feedback and would be delighted to know if you liked it!) I am glad that you were interested enough to get this far. I hope we can all continue to support ONF as much as we've enjoyed their music, and that Go Live gets them all the attention they deserve!_


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